


rooms full of people who do not love each other yet

by seaer



Series: magnus library [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Found Family, Multi, Pining, a copious amount of Leitners, dread powers still exist but are mostly overshadowed by the intricacies of teenhood, library club, perhaps even...mutual?, secondary school actually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:47:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 68,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26673163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaer/pseuds/seaer
Summary: Was there ever a more conducive environment for strangeness? Leitners circulate in the library system like demons through damnation. Hallways twist into impossible configurations. Above everything, a man watches, green-eyed and pensive, all-seeing. Boys who have been teenagers since the nineties repeat the same grade and watch their teachers’ eyes fog over with memories unshaping themselves.Or: Jonathan Sims (fifteen years of age), a watchful school, the losing of his lonesomeness, and a whole library of books older than your great-grandfather’s dick.
Relationships: Georgie Barker & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Gerard Keay & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood, Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Melanie King & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Michael "Mike" Crew & Gerard Keay, Michael "Mike" Crew/Gerard Keay
Series: magnus library [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2070711
Comments: 506
Kudos: 338





	1. Respectfully

**Author's Note:**

> title from brad trumpfheller’s [time’s not an arrow, more the place an arrow touches us](https://www.arkint.org/brad-trumpfheller). poem’s not technically thematic but i think the line in particular is

Jonathan Sims cruises into the lane where the back door of the Magnus Academy school library is and slides off his bicycle. Briefly he casts his head back to check for anyone who might have seen him, cautious ever since the last time a teacher caught him riding and nearly put him in detention, but there isn’t anyone. He lets his schoolbag dangle from one shoulder, digs his chain from it and locks his bicycle outside the library. It’s a big campus, and he’s not built for walking long-distance—the library is secluded, set apart in a manner somewhere between exiled and sacred.

The rest of the club isn’t in yet. They come in from the school side, usually, with snacks they try to hide in their pockets. Once the other Year 10s ordered an entire Diavola pizza to the library, and to their credit nearly finished it between the three of them before Jon caught them. For now, Jon is alone with the books, the undercutting scent of old pages. Barely any of the books in the Magnus Library are new.

He turns on an overhead light to start work by and leaves the rest of the library in its dim dust. The month’s book display is done, and they did the reshelving on Monday, so Jon is stuck for ideas. He powers the library counter’s desktop computer on like it has answers. 

It doesn’t, so he does his own homework instead, draws a couple of passable graphs. The tell-tale sound of laughter floats in, muffled from outside, and a second later the chime on the front entrance twinkles and the voices become clear. “—Four boxes at the same time, I’m telling you! And he’s letting it just waste away?” “I don’t want to get knee surgery at thirty!” “You don’t have to play! You just have to stand around in the uniform when we have games! You’re six two!”

Sasha’s the first, turning the corner with the two other boys bantering in tow. “Afternoon,” she greets brightly. “I like the ambience you’ve got going on here.”

Jon frowns. “Afternoon.”

“What’s the schedule today, boss?” Tim says, taking a break from ragging on Martin to ask. Jon can’t tell if he’s serious or mocking.

He coughs. “Not much, actually. No one’s returned any new books so far.”

With a spirited “Hallelujah!” Tim turns to face the rest of the library, throwing his arms up as far as the weight of his yellow Kanken will let him. Sasha laughs. Jon rolls his eyes while Tim has his back turned.

The three settle in around the tables for the day, dropping bags on the floor and continuing with their outside voices. It takes Jon a long moment to realise that Sasha is lingering. She’s observant; she’s noticed Jon’s prolonged scowl.

“I’m sure there’s something to be done,” she says. Jon can tell that this, at least, is for Jon’s own sake.

One of his eyebrows quirks up at the edge. “Like what?” he tries.

She shrugs, eyes sliding thoughtfully up. “Um. Tracking down overdue books?”

Faintly, a lightbulb goes on in the back of Jon’s head. Do we do that here? he thinks, but stops himself from saying it out loud and revealing the sham of his competency just in time. “That’s not a half bad idea,” he says instead, grudgingly.

“Thanks. Do we have a record for that on the computer?” Sasha suggests. They check for one. It turns out they do. Neither of them has ever used it before, but Jon supposes it was more his responsibility than Sasha’s that has been shirked.

There’s two short-term overdues, a few days or so. One book has been gone for about a month. The one at the very bottom of the list, the solitaire in the diadem, has been overdue for more than two years.

“My God,” Sasha comments, amused. “How long was he reading that book?”

Jon lets out a breath of an inadvertent smile but forces his mouth into a line. “Infinite Jest?”

Sasha huffs her mirth. “Definitely.”

“Why didn’t Ms Robinson go after him? She was alive two years ago.” Jon checked the last box of information for the digits. “Now he owes us two hundred pounds.”

“Maybe that was her master plan, to rake in the money for the school.”

“Huh. Maybe. I’ll write some emails.” Burning to redeem himself after the revelation that he’s been neglecting a very significant presidential duty for ages, he pulls up another tab.

“Make it aggressive,” is Sasha’s suggestion.

“Of course.”

He drafts one as she goes to kick back with the other Year 10s. The younger students are streaming in, and someone turns on the rest of the lights, souring Jon’s mood. He doesn’t particularly like any of them. They don’t like him either, probably. Unliked and unqualified, the dynamic duo of his promotion.

He was surprised, too, when Elias approached him about it. He didn’t think that Elias had the administrative power to make him president; he and his Juul were the reason the club had to retire a whole shelf of volumes, what with the water damage. He’d cornered Jon in a part of the library that smelled vaguely of earth (Jon was not aware what cannabis smelled like). His opener was, “Jonathan, right? You want to be library king? King of the fucking, library?”

Within a week Jon had been instated as club president. When he’d asked the older kids for any advice they could give, they were cryptic at best. “Don’t let anyone under five feet in here,” was one piece of advice. “Read,” was another. Or, “There are two doors in the library. Remember that.”

Other than that, Jon likes library club just fine. The building is nice, all skylight and wood. He likes being around books. He also likes having somewhere to be that isn’t home, as if being virtually alone in the library is any different from being virtually alone at home. Sure feels that way.

The truth is that he can’t stand the weight of being at home. Sometimes the silence bites into him like a garrote, a quiet of a different quality than the hush of the library. Something stagnant. Unwelcoming. His grandmother in her room asleep or on the phone with a friend. When she’s on the phone Jon likes to put his ear to the door and listen, just to know that she’s still in there, breathing and thinking and talking in fast strung-together lyrics he isn’t fluent enough to parse. She only ever talks to him in English.

He dislikes sleeping at home the most; when he has to turn off the lights and walk, alone, through the quiet dark of the house to his bedroom. Although he is too old to be scared of the dark, solitude is ingenious in filling the shadows with teeth. 

But he can’t stay in the library overnight, or he’ll get an earful (he tried once). Today there’s really no other work to see to, so he packs his bag earlier than usual and waits for everybody else to leave. He likes to go home by himself; it makes him feel self-sufficient. And leaving with the crowd is intolerable. He’d fallen in step once behind some dithering Year 9s, wheeling his bicycle, and one of them noticed him and pulled urgently on their friend’s sleeve to get them to stop talking. Jon is a smart kid; he doesn’t need to hear his name to know when gossip is about him.

Waiting, he finds himself thinking about the two-year overdue book. He’s sent the strongly-worded email to its borrower. The book itself is a curiosity, authorless, its title in a language Jon recognises as Sanskrit. The alphabets are sharper, less musical. Jon wonders if the two years overdue were spent learning the language. He wonders, privately jealous, if they already knew Sanskrit well enough to excise meaning from a text so difficult. He still struggles through the middle-grade books in his own mother tongue that they let him read at the language center. 

Someone clears their throat, and Jon’s head shoots up. The owner of the cleared throat isn’t anybody Jon recognises from the club. There are four flouted school rules in his left ear alone, glinting in the evening light. “Hey,” he says, a touch bored.

“Can I help you?” Jon tries.

“Wanted to ask about a book.” The boy has his hand on the counter, and he leans into it, nonchalant. The library is air-conditioned, but by no means frigid, and Jon can’t help but feel sweaty just looking at the layers he’s wearing; what looks like old leather over an olive-green Magnus pullover over his school shirt. “Do you have A Journal of the Plague Year?”

Jon says, tetchily, “We’re about to close.”

“I know. Do you have A Journal of the Plague Year?”

“Didn’t occur to you to check the shelves yourself?” Jon snipes, but pulls up the book registry.

“I did. Couldn’t find it.”

Jon makes a sound he hopes is haughtily judgmental enough. He types the book’s title into the search as slowly as he can. “It’s on loan. You can check back in a week or something.” In fact, A Journal of the Plague Year is the month-overdue book. 

“On loan?” the boy repeats, suddenly intrigued. He leans even closer. “By who?”

“That’s not something we’re allowed to disclose.” Jon’s eyes flit to the name on the screen, unfamiliar to him. Michael Crew. Jon thinks the name sounds like it belongs to someone who has two children and enjoys barbecuing. 

“Why not?” The boy is relentless.

“It’s a privacy thing.”

“What? Afraid I’ll track down this bloke and fistfight him for a library book?” his pitch rises in incredulity.

Jon scrutinises him. His hair is unnaturally black, the knuckles of his right hand are bandaged in white, and his school pants have a slit in them that Jon is pretty sure is purposeful, revealing the blue swoops of a ballpoint-penned eye on his knee. “Yes,” Jon says.

“I won’t,” the boy promises, extending the little finger of the hand that isn’t on the counter. “We can pinky swear. Just tell me his...” Halfway through his sentence the boy’s voice goes small, his eyes flashing as if witness to some unseen terror. “Oh, huh. I see. Nevermind, thank you,” he says quickly, taking his hand off the counter and dropping back on his heels.

Suspicious, Jon meets his eyes. They’re wider than before, pupils invisible in the brown. He knows, then, that the boy knows, too. The thought leaves him bewildered as soon as it hits. Knows what? Before Jon can ask, the boy looks away and turns to leave, footsteps quick in his singular exodus. Jon has to stop himself from calling after his receding form. 

His thoughts are afire with confusion. Perplexed, he looks over his shoulder for anything that could have been the cause. There’s a portrait of the school’s founder on the wall above, but it seems too high up. For all Jon can tell, the boy had been looking at Jon.

By then, he’s the last in the library. Just as well. He powers off the computer, shoulders his backpack and moves to switch the lights off. The air conditioning stops with a whine and a familiar stillness. He jumps the three-step down to the back of the library and forges out through the back door, into the warmth of the sunlit lane. His bicycle is where he left it. He thinks so thoroughly through the interaction that he almost rides into a trashcan on his way out of school.

A Journal of the Plague Year. The book in Sanskrit, the title a solitary word, Asthikumbha, urn. Both of the titles circle the same planet in him. They seem cut of the same cloth, somehow. He turns into the alley of a shortcut home and puts the matter out of his mind.

To: keay_gerard_2021@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
From: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: Outstanding Fines (अस्थिकुम्भ)

Dear Mr Keay,

It has come to our attention that you have neither returned the book you borrowed in February 2019 nor made any effort to pay the late return fees it has incurred. We urge you to do both as soon as possible.

Title: अस्थिकुम्भ  
Author: N/A  
Date Borrowed: 6/2/19  
Days Overdue: 761  
Fee: £216.62

The timely return of any books borrowed from the school library is imperative. Further disregard for school property may henceforth result in your being barred from borrowing any other volumes.

Respectfully,  
Jonathan Sims  
On Behalf of the Library Club

To: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
From: keay_gerard_2021@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: Re: Outstanding Fines (अस्थिकुम्भ)

Dear Jonathan,

lol.

Sent from my iPhone


	2. Good & Proper Mystery

Martin Blackwood loves many things. Tea (all kinds). Dogs (all kinds). The crack of lightning down the sky, especially when it rains so hard that the drains overflow and he has an excuse to stay in school after it’s ended rather than face the grey thunderstorm on the way home. A good and proper mystery, one that really grabs him by the lapels into its charmingly-crafted inner workings. Old things that he could get new but doesn’t because he likes them old, likes rolling their little dials to wind the silver halide plastic, even if he has to save his pocket money for months to buy them. His friends.

He loves his friends such that when he thinks back to the year before he can scarcely recognise the outline of his life. Like a bad pencil sketch of himself and all of the temporary things that ran through his head. Sometimes, like last Friday when Sasha dragged out her old yearbook with the pictures of all the classes in the level (and the school), he’ll see the Martin of the past and want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him silly.

“Pass me the camera and I can take one of the two of you,” Tim had said after Martin complained of how he hated every yearbook picture of himself. “And you can mess your hair up in this one so you don’t look like you have a rod up your arse.”

He still has a bit to go before his roll is done, but the picture of him and Sasha is something he wants badly to see. She’d put her arm around his shoulders at the last second and it had startled him almost as much as the blaze of the flash. He’s never seen himself on his film before, hadn’t had anyone to take a picture of him with his Olympus until Tim. Since then they’ve put a few more Martin features on the roll; solo shot of him sitting on the floor outside the library, squinting without his glasses on; him and Tim mid-laugh after one of Tim’s rugby matches, grass on both Martin’s school shirt and Tim’s socks, face, jersey.

He has to admit that he does trust Sasha’s shots to come out nicer than Tim’s. She’s got an eye for it, has an eye for most everything, if Martin is being honest. He thinks sometimes that maybe she had an eye for the loneliest sod in the entire universe the first time they talked. Not like it wasn’t obvious. Now that Martin thinks back, he might as well have been walking around with a miniature storm cloud over his head constantly pelting rain. 

His first year of school had been fine. He talked to a few people, maybe had a few friends before Helen Richardson had decided that her ambitions for secondary school would not fly with Martin as her closest acquaintance and ditched him to hang out with the group of cooler kids who always loitered against the doorframes of the classrooms so you couldn’t enter or exit without talking to them (an unpleasant experience most of the time). He didn’t mind, not really, was actually slightly relieved. He was independent. He would survive.

He’d skip the class bonding trips to the museum or the park out of necessity and eventually build a habit. He needed the extra time to finish his homework and cook meals for him and his mum and run down to the pharmacy when she asked him to, and he’d already been to the museum, once, when he was five, so it was really better that way. He would smile politely when his classmates tried to make small talk with him. Endure enough painful not-conversations that he started to pack up his food and move to another table when someone else sat at his during lunch break.

It was because of a culmination of every avoidant action that Martin Blackwood, at fourteen years old, had found himself, entirely, astonishingly alone. He knew his classmates’ names only cursorily, and some days he didn’t even know that, mixed two people with the same kind of spectacles together in his mind. He did projects alone because the class had an odd number (teachers tried to coerce him into trios, he’d circumvented with the expert ease of the world’s loneliest diplomat). 

He‘d taken to eating alone in the small paved area behind the school that smelled constantly of ash and nearly ruined his shoes stepping on still-glowing matches left by recently-departed arsonists until, upon arriving too early to his lunch spot, he’d been accosted by an older girl with a buzzed head who had told him in no uncertain terms to vacate immediately, and he’d been too scared to ever try to return.

Like this it carried on for what felt like centuries. He bit his tongue on his thoughts so often that silence was a reflex. He grew to despise the grating noise of other people’s voices, too loud and too happy. Martin thinks now, in a way that he never realised before, that solitude feeds itself as easily as a wild animal, festers if left to its own devices. The most crucial thing to it is disruption. An intervening force.

PE class was when it happened. They were in the middle of a rather unsuccessful squash unit and Martin had expected to have to rally again with the teacher, who had been some four-time squash champion in her day and was quickly losing patience for the utter debacle of Martin’s serve. A girl stopped him with a tap on the shoulder before he could take a racquet. 

“Martin?” she asked. She was tall, not too far below Martin even though his last growth spurt had sent him well up. “You have a partner yet?”

Martin was not surprised to find that he had literally no clue what her name was. “Um, no.”

She swung the squash racquet in her hand absently. “Wanna pair up?”

On hearing this, Martin cast a bewildered gaze around the class and recalled faintly something about Tim Stoker being home sick. “Sure,” he lied.

They hit back and forth for a while, then took a water break that was longer than strictly necessary. Sasha (that was her name, he discovered after he’d made his best guess and been wrong) had forgotten her bottle, so they trekked to the water fountain outside the courts even as she complained about how the water tasted a little like iron on a good day, and a lot like iron on a bad day. 

“Isn’t that good for you?” Martin had said. “Like, for your blood.”

“My blood is fine,” Sasha insisted. Then: “Oh, shit. You don’t think it tastes like that because someone’s blood is in it, do you?”

“We’ve been drinking it for years,” Martin said, half-horrified. 

Sasha looked genuinely deep in thought. “No, it only started tasting like this a while back.” 

“How long ago?” Martin was not in the habit of drinking from the fountains. 

“Like, maybe a month.” 

“Maybe you should stop drinking from it.”

“No, I’m gonna,” said Sasha. “So I know if it stops tasting like blood.”

“Maybe,” Martin started, suddenly aware that this might have been the longest conversation he’d had that year, “it tastes like metal because the water fountain is made of metal.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sasha countered. “Look, Martin, you should try it. You’ll see what I mean. Like, it’s so strong that it’s concerning.”

“Hard pass.”

“Really. It’s not like you’ll die, I’ve drank like liters of it by now, probably.”

Martin had conceded one unpleasant sip and gagged right after. Sasha had felt bad enough that when PE ended and their lunch break began she bought him a milkshake and they’d sat on the empty bleachers watching birds fight on the school field. It was more ice than milk, really, but it was the best thing Martin had drank in what felt like his entire life.

They started to hang out, then, in the small ways that Martin thought wouldn’t hurt. Tim’s flu bug came and went and he was back in school again, and very slowly Martin began to be inducted into what he could consider to be a friendship. He was still quiet, watchful, let Tim and Sasha banter back and forth while he focused on his food and thought of things to say that he didn’t say.

It was near the end of the summer term, and students had started to print posters and flyers for their clubs and societies and hand them around with varying degrees of aggression. Martin, who had never been willing to forfeit the time for any extracurriculars, declined flyer after flyer until he got sick of it and just let them put the papers in his hand so he could put them in the bin when they turned away. While he was waiting for Sasha outside the loo a boy around his age with very imposing eyebrows over a pair of equally imposing wire-rimmed glasses wordlessly held one out to him; he took it as if supernaturally compelled. The boy, appeased, nodded, turned back to the crowd.

He glanced over to Tim, who’d floated over to stand by him. They’d talked, before, maybe a few words. Tim was holding in his hand the same moss-green flyer that Martin was, and they both seemed to notice at the same time, Tim’s eyebrows going up in recognition. They regarded the stately owl on each other’s flyer with some interest.

“Reckon you’ll join up?” Tim asked. His voice really carried, and he didn’t seem to feel the need to lower it even though Martin was right next to him. “Sasha’s in it. Seems like she has fun.”

“Huh.” Examining his own flyer, Martin saw the neat serif that indicated it was an advertisement for the school’s library club. “Not sure. I might. Probably not, but.”

“I honestly don’t even know what you could do in library club. Read?” Tim turned his flyer over, but the back was blank.

Martin found he quite liked Tim’s voice, thought it had the quality of self-assuredness that spoke of an owner who had never once doubted his cadence or hated his pitch. “Shelve books?” he offered, smiling incredulously. 

Tim’s nose scrunched. “Build shelves?”

“Hand-carve copper shelf labels?”

“Resurrect the corpse of Charles Dickinson to get an interview for the school magazine?” Tim bumped his shoulder against Martin’s conspiratorially. 

“Charles Dickinson?” said Martin with a half-laugh before he could stop himself. “I don’t...”

“Dickens. I said Charles Dickens,” Tim’d corrected himself crossly. “It’s the dicks, man, they get all tangled together in my brain,” he said, and then snorted, and suddenly they were both overcome with giggles like they were in primary school again. Sasha had come out of the girls’ toilet and caught them crying with laughter, the advertisement for library club crunched up in Martin’s closed fist.

Nowadays he laughs so much when he’s around Tim that it’s a wonder he ever survived without. Back then Tim mentioned the kid who had given him the flyer with some amusement: “—looked like, God, this is going to sound stupid, but he looked like a baby adult,” he said, and Martin had concurred so fast he nearly tripped over his own feet while they were walking.

“With the Magnus pullover? I got mine from him, too,” Martin said. “It’s like someone shrank down a librarian and put him in school.”

He uncrumpled the flyer and smoothed it as best as he could. Checking the dates on it, he found himself quite enchanted by the concept of library club. Sasha peered over his shoulder. “Hey, you two should join! There’s hardly anyone from our cohort. I get really bored.”

“I don’t want to be bored,” Tim objected. 

“You won’t be bored because I’ll be there,” Sasha pointed out.

Tim considered this. “Oh, right.”

“And did you know the teacher in charge of the club died? Apparently they never found her body,” Sasha said nonchalantly. (“What?” from both of the boys.) “Yeah. Now the students run all the events.”

“I think I heard about that,” Tim said. “Ms Robinson? Wasn’t she like, super old?”

“She was old, but not sickly. I think she was a secret agent or something.”

“And you thought this dead teacher was somehow going to persuade us to join.”

Martin said, meekly, “Lends it a bit of spice, I guess. Rest in peace, though,” he added quickly.

“It’s not all just dead teachers. It‘s fun,” Sasha insisted. “And, I’ll be there.”

The week after, Martin and Sasha sat cheering on the bleachers by the swimming pool over the chaos of the crowd and the swimmers cutting through the water. Tim was wickedly fast, always a leg in front of the others, and when he kicked off his last lap the race had already been won. They watched his dark selkie head bob up at the end of his lane, sleek with chlorine, and he wiped a wet hand over his face before he looked up at the stands and spotted them (going appropriately wild with cheers). He grinned, eyes crescenting, and waved indulgently.

When it was over he found them, still giddy with victory. The medal glinted from his chest below the aquamarine of his goggles around his neck. “I’m going to quit,” he announced, amiable.

“What?” they said simultaneously.

He shrugged. “Just not into it. Think I’ll try rugby next. Besides,” he forged on, “rugby trains Tuesdays and Thursdays. So I have time for library.”

Sasha managed to look both aghast and ecstatic. They reasoned with him all the way down to the showers, and he dismissed all of their concerns level-headedly—he’d tried swimming and he’d been exceptional and now he was going to wash his hands of it. It was boring, anyway, he said, like running, but in water. Martin, vexed, told him that it was not at all like running in water.

“Hey,” Tim said. He lifted the strap of his gold medal slightly as a reminder of who was the expert, and Martin conceded with a roll of his eyes. “Anyway. See you guys later.” He disappeared into the showers, and that was the end of it. Or, more accurately, the start.

Every Wednesday they sit in class gossiping until library club begins. At first they’d sat outside the library, but then Tim had been caught midsentence by the subject of the gossip in question, who had come up behind him like a sitcom trope, whereupon Tim had belatedly noticed the looks on Sasha and Martin’s faces and said, with equal parts horror and relish (like he’d waited his whole life to say it), “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?” Jonathan Sims, who was indeed behind him, said dangerously, “Whose eyebrows do you bet would come off if you grabbed the corner of them and peeled?” All three pairs of eyes trained themselves onto the space above Jonathan’s eyes. From that day onward they did not sit outside the library to gossip.

“Honestly,” Tim said afterward, when they’d been relegated to re-shelving the most frequented portions of the library by the vindictive club president, “was it not a compliment?” He slotted the book in his right hand into a lower shelf and used his liberated index to draw the shape of Jonathan’s eyebrows in the air. “They go, like, this. He could do ads.”

Sasha wheezed from behind the shelf. Martin watched as a self-satisfied grin floated across Tim’s face at the sound. “Anyway, who died and made him king?” he continued.

“Elias, apparently,” said Sasha.

“Elias is dead?” Martin said, alarmed.

“No,” Sasha reassured him at the same time Tim said, “I guess drugs do kill.”

For all the jokes about Jonathan Sim’s (Jon? Sasha calls him Jon) dubious promotion, Martin secretly thinks he was sort of born for it. He has the face, and the voice (Christ! The voice), dry and ridiculously academic.

Martin is also absolutely certain that Jon hates him. Tim is charming, has certainly smoothed some things over with Jon after their poor first impression, but Martin has none of the Stoker talents and all of the Blackwood misfortune. Just the other day he’d dropped his tea onto Jon’s schoolbag on accident. This was even more catastrophic than it sounded, because he wasn’t even allowed to have drinks inside the library, and also because Jon‘s hand had been inside said schoolbag, digging for his pencil case.

(“By Jove!” Jon had cried in horror, and Martin, vexed, was unable to stop himself from laughing despite the circumstances. By Jove? Was he eighty? All of this did nothing to endear him to Jon.)

Still, some traitorous portion of him refuses to kill its optimism. Like a bird fed on nectar for the first time and never again full, he thinks the same of friendship. How complex and sinuous time grows between two different people—Sasha has a lightning-strike of teak through the rest of her dark head; Tim likes his pants folded up just once, twice if he’s feeling adventurous—he drinks information, little oddities about his friends that make him secretly, quietly fond. He thinks that he could know Jon like he knows Sasha and Tim, and it would be just as nice. That he and Jon could be friends, too, if they tried.

“I don’t know,” he’d said one day after library. “He’s not evil. I just think he’s...”

Sasha, jokingly, proposed, “—Misunderstood?”

Martin closed his mouth to hide the fact that Misunderstood was exactly what he’d been about to say. “Sod off,” he said hotly.

“You sod off,” Tim grumbled. “He’s horrid. A demon in a skin suit.” He’d had a particularly strenuous day of fixing spreadsheets at Jon’s behest.

“He’s...” Martin turned it over in his head for a long moment. “Lonely, maybe.” The word struck some wall in his heart when he said it out loud. It was a wistful surprise. He thought of how Jon never left the library before the three of them. He knew because Jon’s bicycle was always on its side outside, locked to a particularly prolific ficus, a permanent fixture like a bronze statue of a coloniser. 

He thought again of how he’d never seen Jon smile at a joke, or heard him ask for help on his homework. Martin saw him sometimes, during school, significant like a flickering storybook protagonist among the mass of other students, walking alone down the stairs with his chin up. The times when they met eyes, he would hold Martin’s gaze with the barest of a squint. Then he would turn his cheek to look calculatively away.

“You’re kind of right,” Sasha conceded. “I’ve never seen him with anybody.”

“So he’s mean because he has no friends?” Tim said. “Have you considered that he has no friends because he’s mean?”

Martin tried not to be hurt by how likely the latter was. He shot his eyebrows up, looking to the space beyond Tim’s shoulder. “He’s right behind you!” he tried. Tim shrieked.

Martin does think that Jonathan Sims is at least a little bit misunderstood. He just can’t figure out why.

If there’s a proverbial heart of gold underneath all that pretentious exoskeleton, it’s shelled pretty deep inside. He’s a menace to the juniors with poor club attendance, a cordial tyrant to Tim and Sasha and Martin. But Martin can’t help but feel that there’s more. A good and proper mystery to him.

Maybe it’s that he’s just a touch silver, premature at his temple like a starburst or a tongue of pale hellfire. Only noticeable if you stand close, but after that impossible to forget. Maybe it’s precisely just that he’s awful that makes Martin want to see if it’s awfulness all the way down. Maybe it’s because the day of the coffee incident Martin bore witness to the contents of his schoolbag: a flimsy paperback on pulp, his graphing display calculator, a half-done worksheet in a language Martin would learn was Tamil, his script inked by a careful hand. Jon’d circled one of the questions and marked a small question mark beside the blank answer line. Tableaus of an inaccessible intimacy, a private life.

None of this, however, is any real help in solving the cipher that is Jonathan Sims. Martin thinks about it more often than he should (he’s weak for any mystery). Finds himself wondering, about Jon, and then more confoundingly, himself. Thinks about it in the school chapel during the doxology and feels his hands shake where they’re raised, upturned.

Just recently, Martin had stayed late in the library with some excuse, waved to Tim and Sasha through the alcove window as they went home first. Jon was still in, working feverishly on the new display of genre book recommendations, but to Martin’s surprise and half-disappointment he gave it an early rest and passed Martin the keys to lock up.

Through the same alcove window Martin watched him bend to unlock his bike. Flip the kickstand up with an expert foot and sling his leg over the seat, schoolbag no burden for the veteran rider. The day was almost gone, pink in the face and orange where the sun touched the clouds.

Jon had barely pedaled two meters when he slowed. Martin, hidden in his vantage point, sat up straighter to see what was stopping him. There was a cat, lying white belly to the sky by the side of the path. Jon brought his left leg over and hopped off his bicycle in one smooth motion, and the cat rolled onto its front as he approached it. Its back was brindle, dappled slightly. Jon crouched.

The cat leaned its head eagerly into the crook of Jon’s outstretched hand. He brightened, and it was such a novel look on his face that Martin bit back a surprised smile. He watched Jon scratch the cat behind the ear dutifully. 

Invitingly, the cat dropped to roll over again. Jon obliged it, scratching its stomach in a manner that evolved into a mathematical two-handed petting (for maximum pet!), ruffling the fur of its white underbelly. The cat’s eyes were closed in contentment. Jon’s face was turned just so, and Martin could see through the window that his mouth was moving, speaking inaudible philosophies to a stray cat on the road. 

Martin felt struck down by some invisible blow. He put his hand to his mouth, leaned his chin into his palm and covered the twist of his expression with his fingers. There was something fluttering inside him, a figurative quickening. A good and proper mystery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am not british but i AM in secondary school in a country that they colonised so i hope i’ve got it down decent enough. let me know if otherwise


	3. Canis Minor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am in the middle of my end of year exams, so naturally, the chapter output is at an all time high

A Journal of the Plague Year circles back to them on Friday, spurred by Jon’s aggressive emailing. The borrower is not what Jon expected. First: Jon is nearly eye-to-eye with him while seated. He looks like he is furiously aware of this fact, almond eyes vindictive. He’s wearing an oversized sports team jacket, zipped all the way up so the stripes touch his chin. In general, Michael Crew looks like he despises barbecuing and would rather avoid it at any cost. His demeanour seems more predisposed to reading, or knife fights.

“I have the book,” he says tersely. “And the eight point five pounds.”

Jon surveys him over the lenses of his spectacles and recalls the warning about not letting people below five feet into the library. “Thank you.” He accepts the Journal and flips the hardback open to stamp its return.

“Don’t read it,” Michael is quick to tell him.

“I wasn’t going to,” Jon replies, bewildered.

“It’s garbage,” says Michael solemnly. “Rots the brain. And everything else, really.”

Something about how direct Michael Crew is makes Jon careless. “Did it rot yours?” he says absent-mindedly as he stamps the date on the thick page prefacing the text.

“I was born without one,” Michael counters. At the look of surprise on Jon’s face, he smiles at last, pleased with himself. “Immune.”

“...Right.” Jon schools himself back into respectability and extends a hand for the money. “Your fee.”

Michael puts the mix of coins and notes into Jon’s palm, casting a glance behind him. “I didn’t know you could have pets in school,” he says, conversationally, to fill the silence as Jon counts the cash.

Jon looks up, confounded not for the first time in the conversation. “We...can’t?”

“I thought I saw...” Michael trails off. “You know what, nevermind. I can still borrow? You wrote something about a Henceforth in the email.”

“Hm? Oh, yes, no need to worry. Thank you for the prompt response.” Jon’s voice sounds faraway to his own ears; he’s too busy examining the bookplate on the interior of a Journal of the Plague Year. The chill starts gradual, from the very tips of his ears and running down like water. Ex Libris Jurgen Leitner. From the library of.

“You’re very welcome.” In the periphery of his vision, Michael blows a strand of dark fringe out of his eyes. He’s watching Jon watching the bookplate, Jon notes, but he makes a vague sound like he’s divesting himself of the matter and leaves the counter. The back of his jacket confesses: MAGNUS ACADEMY POLE VAULT. We have a pole vault team? thinks Jon.

Looking back to the bookplate, Jon has a sneaking suspicion that Michael Crew’s warning might have been literal. The name on the bookplate is distantly, alarmingly familiar to him. He snaps the book shut, disconcerted at the burgeoning memory, and puts it on the cart of returned books.

The two-year-overdue borrower has replied his email, albeit in a less-than-ideal fashion. He opens the reply not for the first time today and seethes. Tim rounds the shelf into view, carrying a stack of papers, looking unusually harried. He’s the kind of person who always seems at ease, hair always calculatedly tousled instead of honestly unkempt, but as of now it’s in atypical disarray. 

Jon notices, but chooses to ignore it. “Tim,” he calls, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “Can I ask you something?”

The fear that crosses Tim’s face is almost comical. His smile twitches. “Yeah, give me a second.” He drops the papers on a side table and rounds the counter to Jon’s side.

“Do you know this person?” Jon hovers the cursor over Gerard Keay’s name. Tim relaxes visibly.

“I don’t think so? I’ve heard of a Jared, though, not sure about a Gerard.”

“You—you do realise you’re saying the same name,” Jon says. 

“Am not,” Tim says. “One’s a J. Other’s a G.”

“Yes, Gerard.”

Tim nods. “And Gerard, with the G.”

“That is what I said.”

“No, you said Jared, with a J.”

Jon has to take five seconds to compose himself. “So you don’t know him, thank you, you can leave now.”

“Always a pleasure,” Tim says brightly, again on the fine line of genuine and deeply sarcastic. From deeper in the library, there’s a crash and a spate of raised voices, like something heavy’s been dropped.

“Is everything alright back—“ Jon wonders out loud, to Tim mostly.

“Yes,” Tim cuts him off. “Don’t see why it wouldn’t be.”

Jon raises a mathematical eyebrow. One of the voices, he can tell, is Martin, repeating something urgently. Heavy footsteps, muffled by the distance. Jon raises his other eyebrow.

“Come to think of it,” Tim starts, voice suddenly several steps louder, “The name Gerard Keay sounds kind of familiar.”

“Does it?” Jon asks sarcastically, rising to his feet. To his shock Tim puts two hands on his shoulders and gently pushes him back down onto the swivel chair. “What the devil are you doing?”

“Don’t overexert yourself!” is Tim’s chipper response. His hands do not move from Jon’s shoulders, steady from the great deal of hurling and chucking Jon assumes he does when training for rugby. Jon thinks there might be tackling involved, too, but can’t be sure.

“I can stand just fine!” Jon hisses venomously. “I don’t know what you’re playing at—“

“Deep breaths. Come on, do ‘em with me now, boss. In! Out!” Tim’s voice has taken on a frantic kind of quality, which, to be honest, Jon feels in kind. “...In!”

Jon finds himself complying until he reaches the second in and snaps out of it. “Unhand me,” he grits out, “this very instant.”

“Gerard Keay,” Tim diverts. “He’s in Year 11, and he’s taller than you. He, uh, he looks like a Gerard, you’ll know when you see him. He...probably...likes reading? Considering he borrowed a book from us. Stop squirming!”

“I don’t think you know Gerard Keay at all,” Jon accuses. “I think you’re trying to distract me from—“ Right on cue, there is the unmistakable sound of a small dog’s bark. Both Jon and Tim freeze. 

Slowly, dangerously, Jon says, “Is there a dog,” a pause, to contain his temper, but mostly for drama. “In the library?”

“Why would there be a dog in the library?” Tim blurts out, and it’s almost convincing enough for Jon to buy it. Almost. He’s loosened his hold on Jon just slightly. Jon seizes the opportunity to slip free, plants one hand on the library counter and swings his legs over it to get away from Tim as fast as possible, breaking into a purposeful stride towards the source of the bark.

Tim, who apparently had not expected any sort of agility whatsoever from Jon, is slow to react. He rounds the counter the normal way, jogging after Jon. “Hey! Hey, boss. Jon. Isn’t it nice weather today?” Jon ignores him. “Really, it’s been so. Tranquil, lately.”

When Jon doesn’t reply, he forges on. “Don’t you feel like a breath of fresh air? Come on, join me, the door’s over there.” Jon rolls his eyes halfway into the back of his skull. Tim is walking sideways, facing Jon with his hands tucked nervously behind his back, and Jon can practically hear him grope for something else distracting to say. He finds it: “Has anyone ever told you you’ve got some good bone structure?” 

Jon falters, helpless, before he catches himself and quickens his pace. His cheeks burn. In fact, no one has, not in those terms. Georgie, maybe, paraphrased. Tim notices his scowl and says, “Hey, I really mean it, don’t run away—“

Jon crosses the row of shelves obscuring the back of the library from view and is greeted by Sasha, standing strategically so that Martin is out of his line of sight. She’s holding a large stack of unshelved books. “Jon!” she exclaims in scripted surprise. “Hi!”

He steps to the side, meaning to get a glimpse of whatever diabolism Martin is up to, but she steps suavely along with him. All he catches sight of is a snatch of Martin’s jumper, cream-coloured and emblazoned with the school’s owl, moving as if he’s grown a new prehensile lump underneath it. “Do you need anything?” Sasha asks, in her best improv concern.

“I’d like to talk to Martin,” Jon says icily.

“Martin’s asleep,” Sasha refutes, and her eyebrow twitches in the sheer regret of the stupidity of the claim. Behind her, where Jon can’t see, Martin shuts his eyes in immediate heed. 

“I thought the two of you were doing the shelving?”

“Poor boy got three hours in last night, what with all the homework. Cut him some slack?” Sasha and Tim both know that this lie is greatly improbable: Martin has not gone below eight hours for years now, so committed is he to taking care of his health. 

Jon does not know this. Better yet, Jon has run on three hours before, and knows the torture of trying to keep his head aloft the day after. For a second he’s almost forgotten about the bark, and Martin’s moving jumper, struck as he is with sympathy. Then the jumper in question yaps in the tenor of an impatient puppy.

Sidestepping Sasha, who has stilled in defeat, he’s just in time to see the coffee-coloured head of a very small Shetland sheepdog worm out of the top of Martin’s jumper. It’s got a little planet of white fur on its tiny forehead. Jon and the puppy regard each other in equal astonishment. Martin looks like a man about to be burned at the stake.

The library is silent, for a while, everything in its proper place if not for the living creature sitting in Martin Blackwood’s pullover. Tim, next to Martin with his hands still outstretched (presumably to receive the dog and evacuate it), drops his hands to the side with a guilty expression on his face.

In any circumstance aside from the middle of the Magnus Academy library, Jon might have been charmed. The dog’s mouth caverns with an expansive pink yawn. “What fresh hell is this?” He feels approximately a million years old.

“I don’t know, it was just alone outside, we thought—“ Tim blusters. 

“I’m dog-sitting,” Martin says over him, so dejectedly that it has to be the truth.

“During library club?” Jon’s voice rises in disbelief. “Is that appropriate?”

“It’s only for today, I swear, and I thought she’d be no trouble,” Martin explains. “I mean, look at her! She’s tiny.”

“Jon, he’s lying to cover for us,” Sasha cuts in, just as Martin says, “Tim’s lying to cover for me.”

Jon takes his glasses off to pinch the bridge of his nose in disappointment. Once he’s mostly assuaged the growing headache, he puts his spectacles back on his face and resumes looking imperious. “Whatever the case, I would be grateful,” he says the word like it means the opposite, “if you would fain to take it outside.”

“I will,” Martin affirms earnestly. “It was me, Jon, don’t believe them.” Tim and Sasha heave successive sighs, Tim’s theatrical, Sasha’s a mere breath out her nose. Martin reaches a penitent hand into his pullover and extracts the dog. It’s not quite so small to be held in one hand, but Martin’s is substantial enough that it’s comfortable. “Sorry.”

“If you say so.” Jon manages to turn even this into a reproach. Martin, dog in arm, moves for the back door of the library. He pauses, hand on the brass handle of the door, and looks back at Jon, or at Sasha behind him (it’s hard to tell), his eyes bright with chagrin. The puppy sneezes into his shirt.

Jon isn’t sure what he’s waiting for, so he settles for a warning. “Don’t let this happen again,” he says darkly, and misses Martin’s rosewood flush when Martin turns, ducks out the door, dark head of tight curls bobbing like a drowned buoy, or a particularly resilient otter.

To: keay_gerard_2021@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
From: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: Re: Re: Outstanding Fines (अस्थिकुम्भ)

Dear Mr Keay,

If you do not return your borrowed volume within a week from the time of this email, your borrowing rights to the Magnus Academy library will be revoked. Your deadline is 6:00pm on the Friday next.

With all due respect,  
Jonathan Sims  
On Behalf of the Library Club

To: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
From: keay_gerard_2021@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Outstanding Fines (अस्थिकुम्भ) 

i don’t think youre gonna be able to handle the bones mister Sims

xo  
gerard keay  
On behalf of Gerard keay

Sent from my iPhone

To: keay_gerard_2021@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
From: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Outstanding Fines (अस्थिकुम्भ)

What bones?

To: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
From: keay_gerard_2021@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Outstanding Fines (अस्थिकुम्भ)

wouldn’t you like to know


	4. Blackwood & Barker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> love writing martin chapters. love an introspective king

The Great Friday Sheltie Calamity weighs on Martin’s mind for the entirety of the weekend and bleeds itself into the next like acid across blue litmus. He can’t deny that it was, objectively, a brainless decision to end all brainless decisions. But the old lady who charged him with her dog had also offered £40 for three hours of dog sitting, and if Martin didn’t know a good deal when he saw one, he wouldn’t’ve been a Blackwood. And the puppy was just so horribly adorable.

 _You never really realise that your best friends are superheroes until you have to conceal a baby sheepdog from your club president,_ Martin muses wistfully during Chem lab while the teacher walks the class through titration steps. _Everyone should experience it at least once._ Granted, they’d been found out, but still, Tim and Sasha have somehow been elevated higher in his mind.

The crowd of students at the front of the lab has begun to disperse. Martin looks around and realises that the demonstration is over, and realises also that he hasn’t absorbed any of the instructions. He carries his square stool back to his bench, where his lab partner is already washing a burette. 

“Are you alright?” she asks. “You’re looking troubled.”

“I am troubled,” he confesses, and regrets it right after. It’s going to be a hell of a time explaining last week’s dog catastrophe.

“Oh, don’t be. Ms Montague’s stories aren’t real. I don’t think that student of hers who went insane after drinking methyl orange ever even existed.”

“What?” Martin casts a nervous glance to the indicator solution on their benchtop. “No, I...”

“That not what you’re troubled about?” she deduces amiably. She closes the tap and says, “Can you pass me the DI?”

“The what?” he’s sure he’s never heard that word before. Today seems, inexorably, to be a day of whats.

“The deionised water,” Georgie supplies, patient. Martin retrieves it for her and watches her run it through the length of the burette. “You can do the alkali. Pipette’s over there.”

Martin is too embarrassed to admit that he cannot, in fact, do the alkali, because he has no idea how to use the pipette. He thinks that there’s something to do with the rubber balloon. He takes a furtive look at what the pair behind them is doing and copies what he sees. Finally, after a few minutes of confusion, he’s surprised to realise that he’s successfully pipetted the correct amount. 

He reaches for a beaker on the counter to deposit the sodium hydroxide. Georgie’s eyes flick to him, and she says just in time, “Martin, in the conical one.”

“Right!” He moves to grab the conical Erlenmeyer instead but knocks it off the counter on accident. He seizes it out of the air. In the panic he nearly drops the pipette in his other hand, but tightens his grip on its slick surface just in time. A great deal of disaster, averted by just a sliver of luck. 

“Nice catch!” is Georgie’s encouragement. “Wow. You should try baseball.”

Martin, by now, has lost count of all the sports he should try. “Thanks,” he says helplessly, and fills the Erlenmeyer. “The, uh, indicator?” Georgie hands him the methyl orange. “How much should I add?”

“Ms Montague said three drops.” He does as told. While Georgie fills the burette, he eyes their teacher, explaining some pipette-related contrivance to a classmate. The classmate in question, Martin’s old arsonistic tormentor with the buzzcut, is listening, rapt, lovesick. 

Martin nudges Georgie. When she looks up, he gestures discreetly with his head toward the scene. They share a private grin.

“She _is_ kind of foxy,” Georgie relents in a whisper to Martin. “Can you blame Jude?”

“I guess so,” Martin says neutrally. “I don’t think Chemistry is a very sexy subject to be teaching.”

“What? No, it’s perfectly sexy. The least sexy subject to teach is History.”

Martin seethes. “That’s the sexiest!”

“It is not,” Georgie says firmly. “You know, my friend says that Ms Montague’s been teaching in M.A. for forty years.” 

“That is not possible.” Ms Montague, her back to them, is personally filling Jude Perry’s burette for her, the set of her shoulders weary. Jude, feigning helplessness, has not stopped making eyes. “She’s like, what, twenty-eight at most?”

“I don’t endorse this conspiracy theory,” Georgie defends herself. She hefts the retort stand from her lab stool to the countertop and slots the filled burette in place so they can read the values on it.

“Then who’s your source? Melanie King?” from the way Georgie sucks in the full of her bottom lip, Martin knows he’s hit the nail on the head. She puts her hands on her hips, eyes on their set-up.

“She made a video about her immortality theories,” Georgie discloses. “I’m subscribed to her YouTube channel.”

“Just you?” Martin smiles, not meanly.

Georgie smiles too, a fond split of white teeth against dark skin. “One out of six.”

“I’ll make it seven.”

“It’s called KingThinks UK.”

“You got it.”

They watch the drip of the acid into the Erlenmeyer, the sunlight of the solution against the white tile. Martin swirls the alkali in the Erlenmeyer like he’s seen the rest of his classmates do, circling the colour in a miniature Charybdis. Georgie bumps his shoulder to get his attention again. “You’ve cheered up.”

Martin is pleasantly surprised to realise that he has. It’s helped, to take his mind off the Jon-related catastrophising. “Titration’s fun.”

“What was bugging you, anyway?” Georgie asks. 

“It’s a long story,” Martin says. “Not to be cliche, but it really is. Now that I think about it, it’s kinda funny, in the worst way.”

“I’m on the edge of my seat,” Georgie prods, and drags her lab stool over to make it literal. Martin huffs his laughter.

“So, I had to dogsit for one of my neighbours on Friday. She wanted to play bridge with her friends, but one of them was allergic, so she couldn’t bring the puppy. I think she’s really into the, uh, gainful employment for youths thing, so she got me to help watch it. For forty pounds.” Martin starts from the start.

“Forty!” echoes Georgie in amazement. “I would pay forty pounds to hang out with a dog. Well, no, I wouldn’t, but I’d do it for free.”

“Yeah, it was a steal, basically. And the dog was so cute, too. But,” Martin says, “the thing was. I had library club the same day, for the same three hours I had to dogsit. But,” he says again, “forty pounds.”

“For just three hours,” Georgie repeats attentively.

“Exactly! I think I would’ve died regretting, if I didn’t take the job. Gone to the grave upset.”

Georgie lowers her voice narratively, obviously amusing herself. “You’re on your deathbed. Your wife leans in close to your still form. Your hands shake. You beckon for her to come closer. She does. You whisper in her ear; your most enduring regret. Why the bleeding bellend didn’t I watch that lady’s dog in twenty-twenty-one? You expire, and then you haunt every teenaged dogsitter forever more.”

Martin snickers, tries not to think about how the hypothetical of his wife makes him feel. “Melanie would do bits on her channel about how every time someone in Britain dogsits, my ghost comes and shouts the living daylights out of them.”

“Hah! Quality content.“

“Anyway, I brought the dog to the library. And, um, it didn’t end very well,” Martin says, solemn at the memory. “Got caught. And kicked out.”

“Of the club?” Georgie asks, suddenly concerned.

“Oh, God, no, I hope not,” Martin says. He frowns. There hadn’t been any words exchanged after Jon sent him out of the library, and now he’s afraid that Georgie’s right, that his ejection will be permanent. “Just the library. I took the dog for a walk, at least.”

“You’re not down for detention, are you?” asks Georgie. “I don’t think...dog concealment is that heinous a crime.”

“No,” Martin confirms. “Plus it wasn’t a teacher who caught me, it was our club president. He’s kind of,” Martin racks his brain for a suitable epithet, “intense.”

Georgie makes a face that Martin can’t decipher. Not quite fond, and not quite displeased, expertly ambivalent. “I’m familiar.”

“You are?” Martin asks, surprised. “With Jon Sims?”

“Yeah,” Georgie says. “Brown, wears glasses, looks like the physical incarnation of the Old Soul trope?”

“That’s him.”

“We did Bio Olympiad together,” Georgie elaborates. “Last year. I think I sort of get what you mean.” She shrugs, her gray pullover lifting over her starched school shirt. “But he’s not all that. Though it might seem that way.” 

Martin wants to say something else, but bites down on the inside of his cheek. Something along the lines of, _He upsets me._ Something like, _He upsets me, but not because I don’t like him. He upsets me because...because...because._ The end of the unsaid sentence drops off into a ravine, the bottom so far down that it’s just a possibility of emerald water, wreathed in black otherwise. Martin stops wanting to say something else.

Georgie’s eyes drift to the flask. Martin’s follow. The solution is on the verge of orange. She lunges for the tap on the burette to stop the titration, but, in a fatal, panicked error, turns it the wrong way. The capillary tube ejects an unbroken stream of hydrochloric acid into the Erlenmeyer. 

“No!” they exclaim in unison as their solution goes irrevocably pink. 

Martin closes the tap of the burette in defeat. The two of them stare, dejected, at their failed titration. Ms Montague passes their bench, and to really drive the bolt home, tells them, “You’ve gone over the equivalence point,” as if it isn’t obvious.

They’re less talkative during the second titration, standing on opposite sides of the Erlenmeyer to watch for the colour change, Georgie swirling this time. Martin watches her hand and thinks of their first lab session together, months ago. 

He’d come to class late. She was already seated at the bench, lab goggles on her forehead, and when he counted off the benchtops for his class list number and joined her meekly she’d looked oddly pleased. Later she would tell him why: the year before she had worked with Oliver Banks, on account of his surname having been in closest proximity to hers. The concept of a lab partner who was Not Oliver Banks, was, at the time, thrilling.

“He never talked to me,” she said. “Well, maybe a few times, but only like, pass the test tubes, or turn the Bunsen burner down kind of things.” The most words he’d said to her had been out of the blue, when he’d been spurred suddenly to confide in her the plot of an allegedly half-prophetic dream he’d had the day before. When the teacher demonstrated experiments, she said, his hands would itch at the air, furrowing surreptitiously at the strings of a phantom cello or violin. “It was awful.”

Martin has seen Oliver around, all misted eyes and skin the romance-novel shade of dark brass. Where Martin had been oppressively quiet, removed, Oliver seems comfortable in his silence, every unspoken word still holding volume. Martin thinks he wouldn’t mind being Oliver’s lab partner. Nothing like a prophetic dream or two. 

Back then, during the first lab session, he and Georgie had to work the Bunsen burner, join efforts to heat some compound into two. Martin can’t remember what. He’d still been new to the whole friends thing, and they were slow to hit it off, exacerbated by the fact that Martin was more than reasonably afraid of the Bunsen burner and couldn’t much think of any topic of conversation.

He told her as such during the second lab. She didn’t laugh, although he’d told her hoping that she might. He found that he did prefer it that way. She reached for the sparker in his hands and lit the Bunsen burner for him. They looked at each other, smiled, sure and shy in equal measure. Martin thought then that he would never get tired of making a friend. 

“We should start a company together,” Georgie said during the third. “B&B.”

His brain went first to Dungeons and Dragons, then edited it for the initials. He put Bungeons and Bragons away quickly and tried to come up with something that made sense. “Bed and breakfast?” Martin asked, quizzical.

“Blackwood and Barker,” Georgie corrected. “But, oh, we could do a bed and breakfast. B&B by B&B.”

“We should do a bookstore,” Martin suggests, finally catching the wind of Georgie’s grand plans in his sails. “Second-hand.”

“We can do a bed and breakfast and bookstore. A B and B and B.” She rushed the string of letters out in a pleased breath.

“And a bathhouse,” Martin added, competitive. “A B and B and B and B...”

“And we can rent out bicycles, too.” Georgie was quicker with her one-up. Back then, Martin had not yet been on the trail of the mystery that was Jonathan Sims, but now he thinks of his and Georgie’s running joke, the rustic amalgam of functions, and can’t shake the image of a boy, riding away on an old rented bike. He feels his face grow hot in the middle of the temperate lab, and doesn’t notice as the solution in the Erlenmeyer goes orange once more, and Georgie, this time, turns the tap in the correct way. “A B and B and B and B and B...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What Colour Magnus Academy Pullover Would You Hypothetically Purchase? A Brief Quiz
> 
> 1\. You borrow a book from the Magnus Academy library. When you get home, it tries to eat your brother. What do you do?
> 
> a. Let it eat him, focus on not being eaten yourself.  
> b. You would not borrow from the Magnus Academy library.  
> c. Tell your parents.  
> d. Eat the book back.
> 
> 2\. You fall into the school’s swimming pool. Why?
> 
> a. ...What do you mean, why?  
> b. You tripped.  
> c. You were pushed.  
> d. You’re about to win this swimming championship.
> 
> 3\. Which of these, in your opinion, is the sexiest subject?
> 
> a. Any language.  
> b. Physics.  
> c. Art.  
> d. PE.
> 
> 4\. How do you draw your graphs?
> 
> a. I have a French curve.  
> b. I have a bendy ruler.  
> c. With my hands.  
> d. I don’t.
> 
> 5\. Pick one of these relatively popular outer gods to tie yourself to forever.
> 
> a. The Eye.  
> b. No thanks.  
> c. The Spiral.  
> d. The Vast.
> 
> 6\. Pick a controversial Magnus Podcast character to kill.
> 
> a. Elias Bouchard.  
> b. Jurgen Leitner.  
> c. Peter Lukas.  
> d. All of the above, with a very large piano on a string.
> 
> 7\. You’re in detention! Why?
> 
> a. Regularly late to school.  
> b. Cheated on a test.  
> c. Ate in class and got caught for the ninth time.  
> d. Arson.
> 
> If you answered mostly As  
> Olive Green  
> You have purchased an olive green pullover. You are thus naturally predisposed to having upsetting adventures. You may or may not be fond of small furry animals, but prefer them with two eyes.
> 
> Notable Olive Green Pullover Owners  
> Jonathan Sims  
> Gerard Keay (unwillingly)  
> Basira Hussain  
> Elias Bouchard (not possessed)  
> Agnes Montague
> 
> If you answered mostly Bs  
> Gray  
> You have purchased a gray pullover. You like to think you have a good head on your shoulders. You are, overall, the most unlikely of all these pullover owners to have this head removed from your shoulders. 
> 
> Notable Gray Pullover Owners  
> Georgie Barker  
> Gerard Keay (in spirit)  
> Oliver Banks  
> Gertrude Robinson  
> Helen Richardson (undistorted)
> 
> If you answered mostly Cs  
> Cream  
> You have purchased a cream-coloured pullover. Of all pullover owners, you are the most likely to understand the appeal of pullover-colour-based personality quizzes. You cried last week, but it was understandable, considering the Lernaean abomination that ate your coursework.
> 
> Notable Cream-coloured Pullover Owners  
> Martin Blackwood  
> Alice “Daisy” Tonner  
> Sasha James  
> Jane Prentiss  
> Annabelle Cane
> 
> If you answered mostly Ds  
> N/A  
> Your outer covering of choice is either nothing, or a school sports team jacket. You are quite difficult to hold on to, which is helpful when you are being chased by horrors beyond your comprehension. Hey. Good luck.
> 
> Notable Sports Team Jacket Owners  
> Timothy Stoker  
> Michael “Mike” Crew  
> Melanie King  
> Jude Perry  
> Mikaele Salesa
> 
> /
> 
> also. credit to [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24981547/chapters/61913761) for opening my eyes to orchestra oliver


	5. Vigilo

To: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
From: keay_gerard_2021@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Outstanding Fines (अस्थिकुम्भ)  
wouldn’t you like to know

To: keay_gerard_2021@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
From: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Outstanding Fines (अस्थिकुम्भ)  
I would.

The school is quiet so early in the morning. The dawn air is slow-moving, ready to lull Jon back into sleep if he dares to blink for too long. But the ride to school had been enough to keep him vigilant, and he’s unfortunately, wearily, awake as he chains his bike to the fig tree in the terracotta pot outside the back door of the library. 

He squints, and can see a planet in the lightening sky. He shivers a little in his sweater at the morning chill and steps to the door, flips the cheap zinc cover on the unfrequented feedback box up and gropes for the ring of keys he slotted inside the previous evening. It’s somewhere by the edge, he thinks blearily. He gropes harder. It is not by the edge.

Finally he wisens up and actually looks into the feedback box. There is no feedback inside, and there are no keys. Jon stifles a swear and looks desperately around the area for anything small and made of metal. Got ideas for our shelves? Let us know! taunts the laminated card taped to the box’s side. He turns his phone’s flashlight on and sweeps the beam around for the hope of a glint. Nothing.

Did he drop them? He stops searching to drag a hand up his forehead and thinks back. No, he remembers quite clearly that he’d put them in. Did someone take them? Why would someone take them? He huffs a breath of warm, frustrated air, and his spectacles fog. 

Just then, it occurs to Jon to try the door. It’s epiphanic in its simplicity. He turns the handle and it yields, mocking. Unnerved, Jon peers first into the library from behind the door. There’s a light on inside, bathing the interior in curious tones, like a sepia photograph. It’s otherwise silent. Still.

Jon slips in sideways and shuts the door carefully. None of the lights are on save the one; the air conditioning is still off, so the library is heady with dust and the graceful decay of pages, the smell that makes some unaccustomed students sneeze to no end. Jon breathes it in like a hit of a drug and wonders if this is what it’s like to be Elias Bouchard. He wonders if they make Juuls in the flavour of old books.

He tries to be quiet as he moves through the library, but his soles shift tellingly on the floor, and he feels foolish for trying to sneak in the first place. He forces himself to walk normally past the shelves. The light, reaching from the front of the library, flickers once.

There’s somebody sitting in the swivel chair behind the counter. His ankles are crossed up on countertop, black school shoes unlaced. A book bound in calfskin is splayed over his face. Underneath it, his breathing is even, rhythmic rises and falls of his chest as he drowses. Jon doesn’t know whether to be confused or irritated.

He circles the counter, tries his best to gauge the boy’s identity. “Hello?” There’s no response. The leather-bound book is entirely plain on its cover, but Jon notices, then, the tiny Sanskrit alphabets running down the spine of the volume. He gingerly lifts the book from its place. 

Jon recognises him: the one who asked about the Plague Year journal, dark hair sleep-wild. One piece of his fringe stands up like a monument. This close, Jon can see where the roots of his hair go browner, just so.

He resists the urge to slam the book back down on his face. Just in time, Jon’s emailing tormentor opens his eyes. He looks annoyingly placid. “Hmm?” He gives a slow, owlish blink, still processing the sight of Jon. “Oh. Good morning.”

“How did you get in?” Jon demands. “And why are you here?”

Gerard (Jon assumes, the infamous Keay Gerard 2021) gets his feet back under him and hops out of the swivel chair. It spins away from him in a fearful orbit. “These?” The ring of keys materialises between his fingers in a miracle of sleight of hand. He hooks his pointer into the middle bit and swings it in a taunting arc. “You should really bring them home, you know.”

Jon decides that grabbing for the keys around Gerard’s finger will demean him even further, so he refrains. “Who told you where to find them?”

Gerard shrugs. “I’ve got a good eye.” Now that he’s standing, Jon is upsettingly aware of the inches Gerard’s got on him, a little bit taller than average for his age where Jon is the opposite. “Any other questions?”

Seeing his chance, Jon takes it. He hefts the book in one hand and fixes Gerard with a Look. “Are you ready to pay me two hundred pounds?”

The keys slow where they’re spinning around Gerard’s finger. He catches himself faltering and resumes spinning them even faster than before. “No. But I can show you something even better.”

“Not sure that’s possible.” Jon thumbs the book open. The inner cover confirms his suspicions. The bookplate recites its mantra: From The Library of Jurgen Leitner.

“Don’t read it,” Gerard warns, alarmed.

“I’m not going to,” Jon snaps back. And I couldn’t, even if I was, it’s in Sanskrit, for God’s sake, he thinks to himself. He shuts the book and lets it hang by his side. “You can show me something better?” He prods, trying to sound derisive to hide his curiosity.

Gerard extends a hand for the book. “Give it here.”

“Not a chance.”

“Look, I came all the way here with it. I’m not going to squirrel it away again if you let me hold it for one second.” He makes a grabbing motion with his hand, and Jon, hesitantly, obliges him. 

Gerard turns, gestures for Jon to follow him. Jon studies the back of his head with distrust and trails after him to where a shelf throws an opaque shadow across the ground. Gerard stops and passes the book under the shadow, businesslike, as if he’s swiping a credit card at checkout. He hands the book back to Jon.

“What?” Jon asks, underwhelmed. 

“Shake it,” Gerard commands. Jon doesn’t comply, deeply puzzled, so Gerard rolls his eyes in a perfect mimicry of Jon’s own habit and puts one hand on the closed volume. He gives it a gentle shake where Jon is still holding it.

Something falls onto the floor by Jon’s feet. Rather, several somethings, all tiny and white as wax. He squints, wrestling with his own poor eyesight, trying to discern what exactly they are. His mind takes a few beats to process what his vision is telling him.

“Are those—?”

“Bones? Yes.” Gerard takes the book back, and Jon, in his confusion, lets him. He holds it in two hands and appraises Jon through narrowed eyes. “I told you that you couldn’t handle the Leitner.”

Jon meets his judgment with his own signature glower. “I’m sorry I’m not immediately warm to your wretched grimoire.”

Almost imperceptibly, the corner of Gerard’s mouth quirks up. “Hey, your library. I just borrow from it.” He holds the Sanskrit book in the shadows once more and shakes out another deluge of tiny animal bones. Jon sees what looks like the skull of a wren or dove, bent by some force so that the tip of its beak rests between two empty eye sockets.

“Not from my library,” Jon argues. He feels as if he is on the precipice of something very dangerous. “From that man’s. You said his name yourself. Jurgen Leitner.”

Gerard nods. “There’s their genesis.” He crouches to sift through the bones he’s generated, finds the warped skull and examines it with faint interest. “Actually, you’re being rather cavalier about this. Don’t you want to know where the bones are coming from? Some kind of scientific explanation?”

“Where are the bones coming from?” Jon prompts.

Gerard gives an infuriating little smile, the Mona Lisa in an errant teenaged boy. “I don’t know.” He gathers up the pile and fills the pockets of his school pants with them. “Do you want some?” 

Jon grimaces. “No, thank you.”

“Suit yourself. They sell for fortunes on Etsy.” Gerard stands again, folding the book in the harbour of his arm. He casts a look around the library and delves deeper into the maze of shelves, weaving in between the dim rows. Jon follows close behind. Gerard finds what he’s looking for with ease, extracting the new book from between others like he’d known exactly where to find it. With a start Jon recognises the book: the other Leitner, the one Michael Crew returned.

Gerard checks for the bookplate, finds it, and closes the book, satisfied. He notices Jon looking at him and raises his eyebrows. “Would you like to know what this one does?” When Jon nods, tentative, Gerard’s face grows serious. It’s an expression that lives perfectly on his features. “It’s an infection. Brings the plague year to you, directly. There was a man in Clapham who had it rot half of his apartment complex before he got rid of it. Not before it rotted his son, though.”

Jon feels a slug of unease pass through him. The book stays dormant in Gerard Keay’s hands, unassuming as any other in the Magnus library. “Rotted his son?”

“To the bone, and then through the bone after,” Gerard elaborates vaguely. “And you keep it in these shelves, for any bookish idiot to impale themselves on.” His tone is light, but with the undeniable undercurrent of an accusation.

“I didn’t know,” Jon defends himself. “And I don’t...”

“I know,” Gerard says. “But I think we can agree that this isn’t something you should leave in a school library.”

Jon frowns. “If you’re going to borrow it, I have to put it down on the record. Are you saying that you’re interested in racking up another fine? For the greater good?”

Gerard makes a face. “I’m not borrowing it.“ He tosses the Journal up and catches it with one hand, careless with something so primordially awful. “It’s going to...disappear. Mysteriously.”

The remaining bureaucratic part of Jon is scandalised that he is so ready to be an accessory to what is basically theft. The rest of him is filled with a grim certainty that Gerard Keay is telling the truth. “You’ll burn it?”

Gerard catches the Journal once more. “Christ, no. I’ll take it to my mom and we’ll sell it to a bookish idiot who actually wants the rot.” He notes the look on Jon’s face and grins, all incisors. “I’ll let you in on a secret. I haven’t borrowed from this library in years.” 

Jon takes it to mean that Gerard has been orchestrating a host of other mysterious disappearances. He scowls. “You could be expelled for something like that.”

“Let him try to expel me,” Gerard dares. “The old man hasn’t done anything meaningful since the 19th century.” He stacks the two Leitners, Plague Year atop the Urn, and moves past Jon to reenter the light. “You can keep the bone book. It didn’t sell. And it’s harmless, mostly, considering most people can’t read it. I’ll bring the fine by soon.”

Jon watches as Gerard flings himself back onto the swivel chair, boneless. He stretches the entirety of his limbs out and looks up at Jon through his hair. “I think,” he says carefully, “You’ve read a Leitner of your own.”

Jon stills, suddenly aware of his own breathing. Gerard’s eyes are unwavering, canny, like a noir gumshoe in a parlour room. Jon does his best not to look away. “I have.”

“Which was it?” Gerard asks. “A watching one? You seem like the type. Or a spiral tabloid.” He’s talking more to himself than Jon, cruising through guesses so strange that they sound like another language. “Something of the spider, maybe.”

The hair on the back of Jon’s neck stands at the last suggestion. “How did you know?” He can almost see the red of the stylised blood; feel the weight of each page in his small hand. He’s older, now, but still he dreams sometimes of the illustrations within, of miles of intricate web and a spider that wants him liquefied and digested like a bluebottle.

Gerard smiles, then, half rue and half conspiracy. If Jon has one skeleton in his closet, Gerard has dug circles in the cemetery, a sixteen-year-old veteran on the circuit of the esoteric. The understanding that passes between them is like gossamer in its unlikely strength. With a dextrous finger Gerard swings the ring of library keys toward Jon; Jon fumbles but catches them. “I told you,” Gerard says. “I have a good eye.”


	6. Vigilo, Secundo

Putting aside all metaphors of skeletons and closets, both Jon and Gerard are on the path of two parallel patronages. Gerry knows this better than Jon; as with most things out of the ordinary. He keeps the Beholding close to his chest, a winning hand of Blackjack, and doesn’t speak of it unless ripping into another of its wards, which he does often, back-and-forth with his mother, who doesn’t care at all for the man either.

But most days he keeps the Eye’s name out of his mouth. Some illogical superstition (but he’s young, he’s allowed his irrationalities), like it’s a titan, or a basilisk, or a particularly vindictive Maths teacher. Or maybe like it’s a deity whose image he doesn’t want to defile. He’s never really sure. 

Regardless of whether he sings its praises or not, it grants him handy insights like the loading screen of a video game, whispering to him the names of the borrowers of the books he hunts, filling in the quotes from that passage of Macbeth he didn’t memorise for the test, or informing him that he needs more iron in his diet if he wants to climb stairs without feeling like his head is full of helium, et cetera. When he forgot Oliver Banks’ December birthday, the Eye reminded him politely the day before (he assumed it was the Eye).

Some part of him also knows that the Eye is on Jonathan Sims, too. When Gerry looks at him he can feel it. Like a prickle that starts at the base of his spine and works its way all the way to the nape of his neck, the recognition he feels is both welcome and alarming. He had a thought, when he was on his way out of the library, that if he ever had a doppelgänger it would be Jonathan Sims. Never mind that they don’t look anything alike. They are twin Rider-Waite magicians, they are, each coming into his own watchful tradition. Someday Gerry might tell Jon this, if he doesn’t find out himself first.

Jon, for one, is not entirely oblivious. He has read one Leitner in its entirety. He knows there is something just beyond the observable, but, like Gerry, he is not eager to speak it. Call it superstition, or circumspection, or fear, if nothing else. Jon does not call it anything. When he stays late in the library he gets the unwelcome sensation that the oil of Jonah Magnus on the wall is boring holes in the back of his skull with its steely eyes. He has not told anybody this, afraid that the confession will make the reality.

Every so often, when he walks the corridors of the school, Jon will be seized by the strangest crawl of what feels first like sickness and then next like terror. It leaves him feeling like a woodland creature in headlights. Tharn forever for the roar of a car that will never come. It is random, fickle with time or place, but always potent like the glare of a stranger. He doesn’t have to be alone for it to see him. He is always alone, even when he isn’t, so it always sees him.

 _Are you watching?_ he’d thought last month, the last time he’d felt it. _Do you know me?_

_What do you see?_

The Magnus Academy was founded sometime in the nineteenth century, and looks quite the part, in Sasha’s opinion. Although it did have the move from Edinburgh, she would’ve believed you if you’d told her the building had been standing in London for some two hundred years. Once she had seen somebody hurl a pencil case at another student, miss, and hit the wall behind instead; the low cornice had crumbled in a mystery cloud of white, and once the coughing had subsided Sasha alone noticed a single, small, white worm crawl out of the new opening. 

“Danny says there’s asbestos in the auditorium,” Tim mentioned, once. “Says he can smell it.”

“How does Danny know what asbestos smells like?” said Sasha.

“How about you ask him, not me?” Tim said, evading the question. Sasha never asked Danny Stoker how he knew what asbestos smelled like, but she thinks it’s safe to assume that somewhere in the vast Magnus campus, there is at least one vein of asbestos, waiting in its malevolent, unquenchable luster.

Apart from the Schrödinger’s asbestos, there is the issue of the odd water. Sasha is sure that she has drunk enough metallic water to ward off anemia for several lifetimes over. She thinks she should probably be more concerned about this. She is not, just marginally curious. Anyway, she doesn’t think that has anything to do with how old the building is. On long days in the library she can feel the school’s age almost physically. It is something beyond old foundations and asbestos and coppery water. It is dormant in every brick and corner and corridor, a sleeping, sentient thing. Ancient and sinuous like a monster curled about a fearful universe. Sasha thinks she is not the only one who knows that there is something quite wrong with the Magnus Academy.

Martin, on some level, does. Just recently Principal Wright had given the morning address, half scripture-reading and half homily. “He is with us always,” his voice droned over the announcement system. “In every moment of happiness or sorrow, His eyes do not leave us. Whenever you think you are alone, He is watching you, and is always by your side.” It was, in Martin’s opinion, a particularly skin-crawling reminder that the school remained in its parochial hold. Sasha had met his eyes across the class and they shared a brief, scared _What?_ moment. 

“He sees all, and drinks it in,” Wright pressed on. Martin had the distinct feeling that their principal had long strayed from referring to any real Christian God. He tried to look as pious as possible and pushed all thoughts of a pair of all-seeing eyes out of his head until the address was over. Later in the day, in the library, Sasha had mimicked Wright’s slippery baritone with startling accuracy: “He watches you when you sleep. He watches you when you eat. He watches you when you wank in the boys’ bathroom—Ow!”

Tim, delighted at both Sasha’s crudeness and Martin’s delicate sensibilities, riffed off, albeit less Wrightlike in his impression: “He is there, watching, while you tenderise your meat, and He longs to one day tenderise your heart in the same way—“ Martin cut him off with a long, drawn-out groan, too harassed to subdue him with the book he’d smacked Sasha with to get her to stop.

“Seriously, though,” Martin had said once the flush had left him. He was lying on his back on one of the sofas at the back of the library, where Jon wouldn’t see the three of them slacking. “Are we studying in a cult?”

“If you think about it, every religion is kind of a cult,” Tim reasoned.

“What makes a cult a cult?” Sasha said, a young Socrates.

“I think the blood sacrifices,” Martin offered.

“Definitely the blood sacrifices,” Tim said.

“What’s this about blood sacrifices?” Jon said from where he had just crossed the shelf, arms akimbo. The three other Year 10s jumped up from their places like cats scattered by gunfire.

In truth, Martin thinks it’s not likely that James Wright is conducting any blood sacrifices. Sure, the man is slippery, overall, and has a way of looking at you that makes you feel like you’ve done something grievously wrong, but Martin thinks he’s a little grey to be sprightly enough for all the slashing a blood sacrifice would entail. The haute rumour in school is that a serial killer murdered him in the 90s and is wearing his skin. Tim, in particular, is subscribed to this school of thought.

Other Magnus rumours include that the school is haunted permanently by the ghost of its founder, who lurks in the second-floor classrooms, flickering lights and slamming doors. The Old Maggie, they call it, affectionately or derisively. (The endearment stretches to the school in general, among its other nicknames; just the perfunctory Magnus, or M.A., or, said with sufficient drama, the Mag. Tim is also fond of referring to the school like a demanding lover: “Can’t hang out, I’ve got to stay late with Maggie today. She wants me in the library.”)

And although unindoctrinated students may find themselves dizzyingly lost in the second floor on their way to the labs, it is in their best interest to laugh when they finally reach it after what feels like hours but is really five minutes, and blame it, indisputably, on the Old Magnus. If the lights glowed on them first brighter like close moons on another planet, then dimmer, teasingly, threatening to go dark, they do not dwell on it. The lights in those unwindowed second floor hallways are old, halogen, probably stagnant from another century. They are temperamental. You forgive them if they leave spots of unwavering colour in your vision, little seigaiha waves in neon that remain long after you leave the corridors.

Michael Crew, devoid of any internal compass as he is, has been lost in the second floor on more than one occasion. The hallways turn into each other nonsensically, and all seem to him perfectly identical. His erstwhile lab partner, Manuela Dominguez, had been with him for one of the labyrinth nightmares. For minutes they walked down the same hall, past the same bulletin for that year’s talent show. He’d grown more and more agitated, sure that he’d caught a snatch of that ozone scent a while ago, and very close to flying off the handle if the accursed hallway didn’t have the decency to end soon.

“Was this hallway always this long?” Manuela wondered out loud.

“I swear to God it wasn’t so long yesterday,” Mike complained.

Manuela saw an opening and took it. “That’s what she said.” Right then the halogen light overhead went out with a distressingly loud pop. Mike, embarrassingly, shrieked and flung himself into Manuela’s side. In direct contrast, she laughed into the darkness, delighted.

“Jonah Magnus hates you!” she crowed. “Jonah Magnus wants you dead, Crew!” 

“Shut up! Shut up!” he shouted back. “Ghosts aren’t real!” In the end they made it, unscathed, to lab. On their way back after class, the hallway was its regular length, and the light was on, bright as ever. Manuela seemed disappointed.

For the things that have been studying in M.A. for longer than the ordinary, all of this is welcome. Was there ever a more conducive environment for strangeness? Leitners circulate in the library system like demons through damnation. Hallways twist into impossible configurations. Above everything, a man watches, green-eyed and pensive, all-seeing. Boys who have been teenagers since the nineties repeat the same grade and watch their teachers’ eyes fog over with memories unshaping themselves.

The school is a habitat, an enigmatic ecosystem. Few people have fully pulled back the curtain on its truth to see it unclouded. Some, like Georgie Barker, have pulled the curtain back, seen its truth, and gingerly replaced the curtain to be dealt with in another lifetime. Maybe this is the wiser. She will not speak of the skull she found in the desk drawer, until many years later, to Melanie King, in the bathroom of a bar as she holds Melanie’s bleached hair back so she can throw up unhindered. Back then Georgie, struck with the certainty that the grinning bone that stared back at her was real and had once been inside something living, had shut the drawer neatly and decided to search for a hole-puncher anywhere else in the classroom.

For the rest that have never come close to seeing the veil, M.A. is fine. Unremarkable. The uniform is as uniform as uniforms can get, and at the start of each school year they sell Magnus jumpers in two different colours to interested students. (Once, they sold the coveted gray jumper, in its charcoal exclusivity, but now, no matter how hard Gerard looks, no one is willing to sell him one.) There’s a swimming pool, an AstroTurf field, and, for good measure, a real grass rugby field. Every time the computer in the library needs maintenance Jon curses the two fields for burning the money in the deep Lukas pockets that could have gone to a computer that doesn’t hate his guts.

“Why can’t you play rugby on an artificial field?” Martin had voiced Jon’s question once, to Tim.

“It scrapes you up,” Tim explained. “If you get tackled into it it takes all the skin off of you.”

“God forbid you have a scratch to go with the blunt force trauma,” Sasha said dryly from where her head was dropped on Tim’s shoulder.

“I played on AstroTurf once,” Tim said. “I also learned what the inside of my thigh looks like.”

Like any other mundane secondary institution, the Magnus Academy hosts some (debatably) fun things, like talks with venture capitalists and annual talent shows. Early March the noticeboards start to fill with advertisements that say things like _Is Your Name Michael/Mike/Mikhail/Mikayla/Michaela/Etc? Do You Play The Keyboard/Bass/Drums? Text This Number If You Are Interested In Joining A Band For The April Talent Show_ , scrawled in red marker on notebook paper. 

Tim: “I kind of want to sign up for it.”

“To do what?” Sasha asked. “Stand-up comedy?”

“Recite pi to the hundredth decimal place,” he suggested. He sat up, caught on an Eureka! moment. “You see, I think I saw it on some TV show. You just need to know up to like, the first ten. Then you can say whatever bloody numbers you see fit. Who’s going to know?”

“Any old sod can google the real thing and fact-check you on the spot,” Martin pointed out.

“That’s why I have you and Sasha,” Tim said. “You’ll be in the crowd, and the moment you see someone pull out their phone it’s your job to kidnap them and silence them for me. We’ll split the prize money three ways.”

“I would not give first prize to a pi reciter if I was a talent show judge,” Sasha said.

“That’s because you have no taste for the finer arts of life,” Tim said loftily.

Principal Wright attends the talent show every year, in the best seat of the house. Backstage after your performance you might confer with the other acts, hear the insistence of a musician that she’d slipped on her strings when she felt the knife of Wright’s curious gaze twist. Fuel the fire of the serial-killer-wearing-his-skin theory. No matter, though. No one signs up for a talent show thinking that no one will watch them.

This year, no one signs up for the talent show thinking that they will leave barefoot, soles slick with red, but despite it all, still pleasantly woozy in the head, unharmed. It will be one for the books, and it will be a shame that nobody will remember that they want to talk about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i would like to think that i am playing this plot by ear . but i think it is more accurate to say that i am flying it by the seat of my pants


	7. Counterfeit

“Okay, correct me if I’m wrong,” Sasha starts. “But this bloke is supposed to have graduated, what, twenty-five years ago?”

Jon snaps back to reality from the haze of his daydream. The library is lucent in the late afternoon, and the other two boys are laughing from behind a shelf, oblivious to the din they’re creating. Jon, separate from it all, is thinking about spiders. “Hm—Huh?” He sits up quickly, takes his chin off the dip of his palm. Sasha pulls the computer over so that he can have a closer look.

She’s typed up an email to another overdue borrower. Jon has to squint to see the address, as with most things, but he makes out what she’s talking about after a couple of seconds. The graduating year, marked on the student’s email, reads 1996. 

“But he...he borrowed a book last month?” Jon asks, mystified. “And I thought they, uh, terminate these emails post-graduation.”

“I thought so too,” Sasha agrees. “His book is just, like, four days overdue? I was going to write something benevolent. Gentle reminder. But with that grad year he’s...forty-one now?”

“Well, no reason why he can’t return his literature.” Jon slouches further down into his chair, swimming in the fabric of his jumper. “I reckon the system is faulty, or something. Was email even invented...?”

Sasha considers it. “I think so?” Her thumb hovers over the mouse. “I’m sending it.” Together they watch as she clicks the button to send. There’s a short stall, filled only by the hum of the PC, and then the screen of the computer fragments in neon, a momentary, nonsensical pattern of digital colour. It fades, like lightning vanishing from a sky, and right after, the computer goes dark. The hum shuts off abruptly.

“That’s new,” Jon remarks.

“Certainly is,” Sasha says. She reaches for the button to turn the computer back on, unfazed. “Was kind of cool.”

“Did it go through?” Jon asks. She checks; it did. “Well, then, nothing to fuss over.”

As per usual, he is wrong.

.

The next time Jon sees Gerard Keay, it is in one of the back sections of the Magnus library. Jon wheels the cart of unshelved books around a shelf and is witness to what looks for all the world like the inside of a neurotic scholar’s study, the floor decadent with books, nearly all the bookshelves empty save for the one that Gerard is currently raiding. He freezes when he sees Jon, and Jon freezes too, and the both of them regard each other quite similarly to two thieves in the same government vault. Michael Crew, from where he’s sitting like a marble miniature among ancient browning texts, flips another normal book open to the inside cover and rolls his eyes with enough feeling to be almost audible.

“What in perdition do you think you’re doing?” is what Jon says when he finally recovers from the shock of the sheer unbridled mess.

Michael, for one, makes no effort to explain himself. “Just swear like a normal person,” he mutters instead into his book. Neither of the other two hear this.

“Browsing,” says Gerard helpfully. “Why? Is the respectable Magnus archive off limits for browsing? Are we forbidden to peruse?”

“You are forbidden,” Jon sputters, deeply vexed, “to despoil the library the way you would your...your grandfather’s personal collection!”

“We are not,” says Gerard, defensive. “We’ll put them back when we’re done.”

“I implore you to put them back right now,”  
Jon insists. “On pain of ejection from the premises.”

“What? You’re going to eject us yourself?” Gerard says as he flips open the covers of each book in the stack he has constructed. Once cleared, he slots them back into the shelf. “Go on. Every day I long for your tender ejection, Mr Sims.”

“Don’t think I won’t.”

“I don’t.”

“Don’t!”

“I’m not!”

“Good!” Jon shoots back. He’s fuming, and quite aware of how ridiculously their exchange is going. “Please put them back.”

Gerard turns to Michael. “Crew, put them back.”

“Put them back yourself. That’s the checked pile.” Michael jerks his head to a crooked stack of not-evil books. Gerard bends to heft it up, depositing them back onto one of the empty shelves.

Jon bristles. “You do know that we don’t shelve these in any random order, do you?”

Gerard blinks. “Ah. Huh. Hm. Alphabetical?”

“Yes, alphabetical!” Jon crosses the red sea of books to join Gerard at the shelves, picking his ungraceful way through the difficult terrain. “Just push them aside, or something, I can hardly walk.” At Jon’s behest, Gerard takes a shoe to the nearest stack, pushing it to clear a small space for Jon to stand. “Not with your foot! Good God.”

“Were you born this bossy?” Gerard asks under his breath. Jon fixes him with a prizewinning glare. “Okay, okay, I get it.”

“This shelf is F. Get these out of it,” Jon pulls a couple of misplaced books out of the shelf Gerard just filled.

“Where do I put them?”

“I’m sure you can figure that out yourself.”

“I guess I can.” They get to work restoring the shelves to some semblance of neatness. Michael continues with the scan for what Jon guesses must be new Leitners. Gerard is passable in his efficiency, and the floor stops looking like the aftermath of a hurricane and more like a deliberate chaos.

“He’s your friend?” Jon asks Gerard quietly as they reshelve books.

Apparently not quietly enough. Michael, from the floor, says at the same time as Gerard does, “We’re not friends.” They’re silent for a while after. Gerard looks nonchalantly over his shoulder to meet Michael’s eyes, and they share a brief, inimical look, before they glance away, satisfied with the accordance. Just as well. Jon thinks they have an air to them that tells of two people who have known each other shortly but powerfully. A tour de force of an allyship. Not friends, then. Yet?

Just then, Martin sticks his head around the bookshelf, visibly harried. “Jon?”

“What?” Jon turns his head, lightly irritated. 

“Sasha—uh, Sasha asked me to get you?” Martin’s voice rises at the end of the sentence like it’s lifted on frantic wings. “Um. Uh, I don’t know...”

“What don’t you know?” Jon asks, well aware he is being insufferable but too ticked-off to fix it.

Martin’s face crumples. “I don’t know! Just go?”

Jon relents with a noise of displeasure. “Could you pick up where I left off?” he asks Martin, indicating the floor full of unshelved books. Martin nods quickly in assent.

Though he quickens his pace in the direction of the counter, he’s not too fast to be out of earshot when Gerard says, “Regular Caligula, isn’t he?” He’s out of range before he can hear Martin’s reply.

Sasha is behind the counter, where Jon last saw her. Tim is perched on a stool behind her, trying to look threatening while sipping purposefully on a carton of juice that he’s not supposed to have in the library. Someone who Jon doesn’t recognise is leaning over the counter. At first, he can only see a head of flaxen hair, impressively curled. 

“You needed me?” Jon addresses Sasha directly. She looks up. So does the blond boy, over a languid shoulder.

“The librarian,” the boy says in delight. His voice is like a chorus of diamond drills searching for a frontal lobe. Jon has to frown to keep the headache out of his skull. “Perhaps you can solve the predicament.”

“What predicament?” Jon says, testy. “Tim, no soft drinks in the library.”

“He lost his library book,” Tim supplies. He puts the half-finished carton behind him as if keeping it out of Jon’s line of sight will wipe all memory of it from his mind. “And can’t remember the name, or author.”

Jon narrows his eyes. “The latter’s no issue. We have a record. But for the missing book...”

“Um, actually,” says Sasha from behind the counter. “I don’t think we have a record. I mean, we do, but it’s, like—could you come over and see for yourself?”

He does as told, peering over Sasha’s shoulder such that she’s balanced out, Jon on one side and Tim on the other, both looking curiously. It’s the list of overdue books. It’s shorter, now, Gerard and Michael’s books having been returned, and Jon’s eyes follow Sasha’s cursor to where the details of one remaining overdue book should be. His mind strains to understand the fractal pattern shifting where there should be words. It’s shaped like letters, tiny meaningless alphabets that hurt to look at, but Jon can’t parse any particular meaning from them. All he gets for his attempt is a good throb in the head. 

“Right,” he says. “I don’t...”

“So I get to keep the book?” the blond boy asks. The name on the screen is still comprehensible, and reveals him as one Michael Shelley. 

“I thought you lost it?” Tim says.

“I did,” the blond Michael says, sulkily. “I didn’t say that I didn’t.”

“You just said that you were going to keep it,” Jon presses. He’s noticed that Tim is being unexpectedly prickly, but if anything, Jon understands. He doesn’t like this Michael either.

“I didn’t,” Michael Shelley says. “I asked if I could keep it.”

“Implying that you have it?” Jon says.

“Nothing was implied. I lost it.” Jon is liking the blond Michael less and less.

“I think you’ll have to pay the cost of the book to the school.” Sasha breaks them out of the nonsense exchange. “It should be around ten quid.”

“Ten quid,” Michael echoes. Even with Jon and Sasha and Tim facing him down like a mismatched triumvirate of bookish Furies, he seems faintly amused. “So be it.” He reaches down his jumper, roots for something within it and contorts his arm enough that Jon has to blink to make sure he is seeing things right. The moment passes, imagined for all Jon can tell. 

Michael extracts a single crisp, peachy bill. There is no sign of any wallet he could have pulled it from. When he holds it out to Sasha, the three Year 10s feel their gazes pulled to the face on the bill unwittingly. Where the queen’s tepid countenance should be is a printed spiral, like someone has peeled Elizabeth’s face off by its plastic tab and revealed a maddening Fibonacci sequence. Michael passes his thumb over the Queen of England’s likeness and when it leaves the surface of the bill her face is royally human as ever.

Sasha does not take the bill. After a second of consideration Michael waves it lightly around before her face. She squints up through the lenses of her glasses. Jon finds it easy to relate. Michael is a trying sight for his already incompetent corneas, unpleasant to look at for no reason Jon understands, an optical illusion. “Can I ask you something?” Sasha says.

“Be my guest.”

“When are you graduating?”

Michael straightens sharply, up off the counter, and like a trick of the light he’s taller than any of them had realised. His entire head of pale hair seems to lift. “Very good,” he says to Sasha, voice a gleeful chorus. His hand closes vicelike around the ten pounds. Resting on the counter, knuckles down, it is a weight at a center of an unseen universe. “Are you sure you’re not the librarian?”

“I just work here,” says Sasha, deadpan.

“I’ll graduate hopefully soon,” Michael says coyly. “Feels like I’ve been in this school for ages.”

“Twenty-ish years?” Jon suggests, eyeing the email address on the computer screen.

“So I retained some grades,” says Michael balefully. “Not all of us have the favour of knowledge when we take our end-year exams, _Jonathan_.” 

From where Jon is standing, he can see when the three emerge from the shelves, apparently done with their dull duty. Michael Crew has his arm locked around Gerard’s head. The position forces Gerard to be bent over such that Michael can keep him companionably pinned. Either Michael Crew is stronger than his build would suggest, or Gerard is humouring him for the time being. Martin is trailing behind them. Unsure how this strange borrower knows his name, but nonetheless undeterred, Jon doesn’t balk. “Surely it’s preposterous that you’ve been held back for a handful of decades, _Michael_.”

At the sound of his name, the other Michael perks up. He releases Gerard to quicken his steps toward the counter where Jon and the rest are. Standing beside Michael Shelley, Michael Crew is so starkly different from him that Jon has to suppress the urge to quirk a smile. They look like character foils in a cartoon.

“You said Michael?” Crew asks, visibly excited.

“No, I meant...” Jon looks meaningfully to Shelley. “His name’s Michael, too.”

Michael barely stifles the small “Yes!” that leaves him. He reaches into the pocket of his windbreaker, almost floating off the ground in excitement, and offers a slip of printed paper to Shelley, who has reverted back to looking blond and soft around the edges. Shelley takes it, curious. 

“What is this?” he asks. His voice now is mellow, almost buttery, doesn’t hurt Jon’s head to hear.

“We’re starting a band for the talent show,” Crew explains. “We need people named Michael to join.” Behind the two Michaels, Gerard rolls his eyes so hard Jon finds it a miracle that it doesn’t blind him. It makes him the spitting image of Crew, before. Jon wonders who picked up the habit from who.

“I don’t play an instrument,” Shelley says, bemused.

“That’s okay!” Crew assures him quickly. “Really, it’s fine, you can probably pick one up quick. Or if not you can play the xylophone.”

“Xylophone,” Shelley echoes. Jon thinks that he might look charmed by the concept. “Alright.”

“Really?” Crew can’t seem to believe his ears. “Wow. Okay. Okay, wait, just put your number in my phone and I’ll text you about it?”

Shelley accepts Crew’s mobile and enters what is supposedly his phone number. With Shelley facing Crew, shoulder to Jon, Jon can see clearly when he taps the same number in succession, entering eight zeroes. He hands the phone back to Crew, who doesn’t seem to notice. He and Gerard don’t stay long after that, having found none of their quarry, they leave together, one in higher spirits than the other. 

Jon watches as Shelley produces a frankly ancient-looking flip phone from the pocket of his school pants. He flicks it open and studies a text he just received.

“That can’t actually be your phone number,” Tim accuses.

“It is,” Shelley says mildly. “Do you want it, too?”

Tim’s ears go pink, but he gets his own phone out and hazards a try at the number. When he puts his phone to his ear in expectation, the flip phone in Michael’s hand begins to cry a guitar solo. “Is that Hotel California?” Tim asks, amazed.

Shelley picks up the call and says smugly into the phone, “It might be.”

After Shelley has left, too, Sasha pulls the ten pound bill flat in between her fingers. There is no trace of anything unusual. “Did you guys see—?”

“Yes,” Jon affirms. “Best make sure it isn’t counterfeit.”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” Tim asks, bewildered.

Sasha does well to mask her exasperation. “How about _you_ take it to the bank, Jon?”

Their points taken, Jon looks up to where Martin is standing in front of the counter. Martin says, “You all look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I don’t know what we saw,” Tim says ominously.

“A headache,” Jon offers. Certainly felt like one.

“Do you think he’s immortal?” Sasha asks. She opens the drawer with the box of coins and notes from overdue fees and drops Shelley’s bill inside. When she sees the three incredulous faces around her, she defends herself with, “He looked a little young for forty!”

“Maybe it’s the Neutrogena,” Tim muses.

Sasha snorts. “I highly doubt it.” Jon doubts, too, but elects not to say so. With some unspoken agreement the three of them do not bring the matter up again in the day. The spiral reappears on Elizabeth’s face, where it lies, dormant, among regular money.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mike: quit your job  
> michael: why  
> mike: join my emo band


	8. First Rule Of Library Club

“One hell of a shiner,” Sasha remarks when Melanie King first turns up on the doorstep of the library, shifting from foot to foot with the strap of her schoolbag in one hand and a book in the other. She has to look up at Sasha to meet her eyes. 

“You should see the other guy,” she shoots back. Sasha laughs at the classic response, and Melanie, all matter-of-fact, adds, “He had to go to the hospital. His parents want to press charges.”

In Sasha’s gobsmacked silence Melanie crosses the threshold and continues into the library. “Apparently this is what Wright thinks detention is. He said I have to help you guys shelve books or whatever.”

“...Right!” Sasha says. “Are you certain? He’s never sent anyone here before.”

Melanie retrieves a folded card from the pocket of her windbreaker for authenticity’s sake. She unfolds it, running her eyes over it like she’s seeing it for the first time, and sniffs in disgust, then passes it for Sasha to evaluate. The card says: _I hereby ascertain that I have completed my corrective duty on the date—_ Someone’s cursive script has penned in the day _—and pledge not to repeat my wrongdoing._ There’s a square box below, presumably for a stamp, and the principal’s signature in the same handwriting. “You have to stamp it. When I’m done. I know, bollocks, right?”

“Huh. Well. Well, this is sort of new. I thought detention was all toilet-cleaning and equipment-polishing.” Sasha turns the card over to see the back; it’s blank. “We do have books that need shelving, though.”

“Why? People actually read these?” Melanie steps in a circle to take in the scope of the Magnus library. “Wow. I had no idea.”

“Yeah, and not enough people have the decency to put them back properly after they’ve browsed,” Sasha laments. “This way. We should take your card to Jon.”

Jon is immediately skeptical. “This is unprecedented,” he says, alarmed, when Sasha gives him the run-down on Melanie. “And does she have proof that this is her appointed task?”

“ _She_ is right here,” says Melanie dangerously. “And can answer her questions herself.”

“Yes, I can see,” Jon counters. Sasha wonders with interest how long it will take Melanie to send Jon to the emergency room after her first victim. “I _can’t_ see why we shouldn’t accept your help, though, so I’ll stamp your card when the day’s books are shelved.”

“And you? You’ll be sitting here, supervising?” Melanie challenges. Jon’s countenance darkens.

“I‘m not the one going around giving my peers stitches.” Jon resumes typing something on the keyboard.

“You’ll be getting the stitches if you keep this up,” Melanie warns him.

“ _Watch_ me keep this up,” Jon says, pettier than Sasha has ever witnessed him. It’s hardly been a minute of interaction; it’s remarkable to her.

“We’ll get to shelving,” Sasha cuts in. She gives Jon a look that’s half amusement and half disapproval. He returns it in kind.

The day’s duty is merciful, though, and before long they’re reduced to sitting around. Jon isn’t half as imperious to Sasha as he is to the two other boys, so she and Melanie are bold enough to do the sitting around in full view. Melanie is surprisingly conversational for someone who recently delivered another student to the ER. 

“You‘ve just never struck me as the library sort,” Melanie is saying. She has her book in her lap, an old copy of Lord of The Flies tabbed in fluorescents for class. “Oh, wait, maybe? No. Not really. I think you’d be great at netball, or something.”

“I am aware that I’m tall,” Sasha says dryly. “All the better to shelve books in high places with.” She’s witnessed Martin being wheedled about wasting his height; never imagined she might be subjected to it too.

“Well. Rather dusty life you’re living out here,” Melanie remarks. “Can’t imagine it’s much fun.”

Sasha leans in close. Melanie shuffles her chair in to receive the secret. Sasha does the same, looks over her shoulder. She leans in again. “It’s not.”

Melanie smiles; it’s halfway to a grin, and pulls a mole by her eye up. “Your club president’s really something. Georgie was right.”

The two of them look over, automatic, at where Jon is seated behind the counter of the library. There’s a dark-haired boy towering over him now. When Jon looks back at them, Melanie gives him the finger. He looks away at the speed of light, like the obscenity is physically painful for him to look at.

“He’s not usually this bitchy,” Sasha says, surprising herself. She’s never the one defending Jon to his scorners; that’s a job for Martin (always). “Maybe something’s up.”

“Something’s up his ass for sure,” Melanie grumbles, and clearly decides to rinse her conversation of the matter, because she crosses her arms over the back of the chair and says, “Are you going to catch the talent show?”

“I don’t think so,” Sasha says. “Tim‘s got a family thing, and Martin has remedial class. So no, I suppose.”

Melanie grins, all teeth. “Why not ask Jon?”

Sasha blinks. She hadn’t thought of that. “Hey.”

“Oh, woah, what? I was joking.” Melanie’s smile fades in an instant. She doesn’t conceal the horror in her voice.

“No, I actually might.” Sasha frowns. For all of Jon’s sharp edges, Martin has been right about him, that he keeps to himself a worrying amount (but recently he seems to have fallen in with some unsavoury company; the boy with the black hair is seated by him now, fidgeting at a stud in his earlobe). Sasha thinks now that it can’t hurt for her to try to get him out and about for once. She puts a finger to her lip. “I think I will, in fact.”

“Sasha, love, are you still sane?” Melanie demands. “What makes you think he’ll agree?”

“I am entirely charming,” Sasha says, straight-faced.

“Well, yeah,” Melanie concurs and colours a bit at her own admission. “I don’t think he’ll be keen on watching six shitty a cappella acts in a row, though.”

“Ye of so little faith,” Sasha says, “in the talents of this institution’s students.”

“I saw last year’s talent show,” Melanie says gravely. “Trust me. But honestly I don’t think he would enjoy good a cappella, either.”

“What gave you the impression?” Sasha says, droll. “Anyway. Tim said that people are wild for things like speed math nowadays. I reckon someone’s going to recite pi as their talent; Jon’ll like that.”

“Ugh,” Melanie says. She sounds thoroughly disgusted. “Teenagers these days, with their god-damned circle ratios. And mental sums. In my day—“

Sasha breaks into laughter, and Melanie cuts herself off with a grin, visibly pleased.

“Seriously, though,” says Melanie after. “How d’you know he’s not going with his...new friend?” She punctuates her words with a slant of her eyes to Jon and the other boy. 

“If Jon has a low opinion of a cappella, I think that bloke would rather slice his fingers off than risk ever hearing it,” Sasha reasons. “So I’m wagering that they aren’t going together.”

“Good point,” Melanie concedes. “Well, if he’s not swayed by your charms, you can come with me and Georgie, if you’d like?”

Sasha’s face falls. “Oh, shit. I _would_ like to. Damn it.”

Melanie crows with laughter. “Don’t let me tempt you away from your charity case.”

Sasha pictures the faces of polite distaste that Jon will likely make at every subpar student song. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“I have something for you,” says Gerard when he blows into the library the next week. He’s had a haircut; he looks freshly shorn, like a churchyard grim after the groomer’s.

“Is it another accursed delinquent?” asks Jon, from behind the counter, without looking up from his work.

“What? No. It’s a book,” Gerard reveals. He puts the book in question on the surface of the counter and cocks an eyebrow. “What’s this about delinquents? Crew wasn’t _that_ bad.”

“I don’t mean Michael.” Jon, bone-tired, looks over his shoulder to where Melanie King and Sasha are draped over a couple of stray chairs. Melanie sees him looking and makes a rude hand gesture. 

Gerard follows his line of sight and says, “Hm.” He doesn’t press it, unfazed, and drops into the chair beside Jon instead. “Forget about any other delinquents. The only delinquents you should be concerned with right now are me and Jurgen.” He turns so he’s sitting backwards on the chair and holds out his newest infernal tome to Jon. It’s thick, plain, looks a little bit like it could be a sketchbook. Jon flips the cover. Inside, in lavender crayon, it says: AUGUST. The page opposite is the one with the familiar bookplate.

“So?” Jon probes.

“So what? Have a look.”

Jon‘s face must convey enough revulsion, because Gerard grins. “This one doesn’t bite. Swear on my soul.”

Tentatively, Jon turns the first milky page. It’s heavy between his fingers. There he finds the source of the sketchbook’s thickness: each page is filled top to bottom with small plastic googly eyes. Gerard reaches over and waves a hand in front of the page. The black circular pupils of the plastic eyes swivel to follow the arc of his palm, rattling along.

“You try,” he suggests. Jon moves his hand, experimentally, over the page. A section of the eyes break away from Gerard’s hand to fix themselves on Jon’s. 

He waves his hand vigorously from side to side, and more of the eyes look to it, vacillating furiously along with Jon’s hand. “Surely there’s some magnet...”

Gerard laughs, genuinely thrilled. “Oh, yes, because everything is magnets. And mirrors, and maybe the power of suggestion.” He lets his hand sway near to Jon’s, stealing the attention of the eyes.

“Don’t forget EM fields.” Jon waves his hand harder and the eyes look back.

“Those are under magnets.” Gerard, too, shakes his hand as fast as he can, and they compete like this for a while, the googly eyes shaking their plastic courses from left to right like they’re watching a very heated tennis match. “Your friends are looking at us.”

“Hardly friends,” Jon admits. “They must think we’ve gone loopy.” He doesn’t want to check to see if what Gerard’s said is true; finds that he doesn’t mind either way. His hand gets tired, so he puts it down again and thumbs through the rest of the pages to check if they’re all googly eyes. They are. “Are you selling this?”

“Probably. I wanted to show you before we did, though.” Gerard laces his fingers together and props his chin up on them. “A break from all the bones and rot.”

“Thank you,” Jon says, strangely grateful. “It was nice of you.” Gerard’s eyebrows go up.

“Oh? The hedgehog keeps its spines at last.”

“I don’t appreciate being compared to a hedgehog.”

“But it’s so apt a metaphor,” says Gerard. “Prickly. Small. Poor eyesight...”

“I’m the hedgehog when your hair looks like _that_?” Jon shoots back. “And my eyesight is fine.”

“I’ve seen you squinting.” Gerard reaches up to run a hand through the back of his head sourly. “I didn’t ask for this haircut. My mum insisted.” 

“Smooth it down the other way, you’re making it worse.” At Jon’s direction Gerard gets the tufts to lie flat. 

They sit quietly for a while, Gerard still messing idly with the plastic eyes. Jon knows any of his attempts to break the silence will be graceless and stilted, so he’s grateful again when Gerard looks up and says, “Talent show, huh?”

It’s such a mundane topic that Jon has to take a beat to process it. “Yes? Michael Crew’s band is playing?”

“Yeah. I’ve told him that it’s a scam,” Gerard sits up from his slouch, suddenly impassioned. “But the little shit won’t listen. How old are we? Are we in kindergarten? Will we line dance while holding hands as our parents clap from the audience?”

“I’m pretty sure talent shows are perfectly normal for secondary school,” Jon points out. “And people do seem excited for it.”

“I mean, you’re not wrong. But it’s funny that we all just pretend to be going to a normal school that has normal talent shows and track meets.” Gerard puts his fingertips to his temple and leans in like he’s nursing a headache. “I’m going, though. Crew told me I have to watch or he’ll unfriend me.”

“I thought you weren’t friends?”

Gerard exhales hard through his nose. “We’re not. Anyway,” he says, “he does have a wicked singing voice. He told me he caught it from the text on the back cover of this one Leitner.”

“He what?” says Jon, unsure if he heard correctly. “There’s no way there’s a book that can do that.”

“I dunno. I might not believe him about that yet,” Gerard says. “But he can sing. Do you want to hear?”

“Alright?” Jon lets himself be pulled up by Gerard. He leads him to the back of the library, where Michael Crew is sprawled on his back on a seat. The other Michael is close by, reading what looks to be a pop-up book about snakes. At the sound of their footsteps, Michael Crew lifts his head, then drops it back down as if winded from the effort.

“Jon wants to hear you sing,” Gerard announces. 

“What? No,” Crew refuses, recalcitrant as any teenager.

“I want to hear you sing,” Gerard amends. “You can do a nursery rhyme or something.”

“I will not burst into song for your amusement.”

Gerard digs into the pocket of his jacket for something and finds it. “How about for one pound sterling?”

He considers. “Two pounds.” Gerard grumbles, but finds another coin and drops the two into Michael’s open palm. Crew pauses, like he’s deep in thought, then clears his throat. He closes his eyes and opens his mouth to sing. The song starts low, then rises, in a language that Jon can’t recognise. It quickens as Crew taps an idle beat against his torso with one finger. The tune reminds Jon of the flute of a folk dance, twisting into green hills and fast feet flicking along to a frantic rhythm. 

Crew shows no strain despite his position, prone with his hands folded across his torso, coin tucked somewhere within. Gerard was right—his voice is spectacular, with a head-emptying quality to it that Jon hasn’t ever heard before. It’s exactly the singing voice that a supernatural book might grant you. Vicious and beautiful.

Gerard tugs on Jon’s wrist from where he’s dropped, cross-legged on the floor. “Sit down.”

Jon, irritated at being jerked from the haze of the song, yanks his wrist away. When Gerard makes a noise of complaint, Jon cuffs him on the back of the head automatically. Gerard’s head snaps up. His glare is murderous.

He makes another grab for Jon’s hand, but Jon dances out of the way and to his other side. “ _What_ is your problem?” One more try—Jon, prepared this time, smacks his hand out of the air. 

Incensed, Gerard goes for Jon’s ankle instead. He’s more successful this time. Jon stumbles as Gerard drags his footing out from under him. “What’s my problem? What’s yours?” he snaps out and finally lowers himself to confront Gerard. He’d meant to sit, maybe give Gerard the cold shoulder in retaliation, but something in him overrides his decision. He goes instead for Gerard’s collar, bowling him over on the floor. Crew’s song hits a long note. 

They land hard together. Gerard grunts in surprise and fury and lashes out with his head; his forehead knocks Jon’s with enough force to set Jon’s world spinning in dull pain. Jon blindly seizes Gerard’s face with one hand and digs his nails in for revenge.

Gerard twists away and swears meaningfully at Jon. He’s reaching up, no doubt to wring Jon’s neck for the insult, but just then, Crew stops singing. “What’s gotten into the two of you?” he demands, propped up on one elbow. 

They both freeze. Jon feels abruptly awoken, sitting as he is with his knee in Gerard’s stomach. With one final twist Gerard manages to dislodge him. They both sit up as Crew lies back down, disinterested.

Gerard casts a furtive glance in Jon’s direction. Jon looks back and then sheepishly away. He draws his knees up loosely to rest his arms on them and avoids looking at Gerard. His head is still pounding the rhythm of the song, his blood beating louder than it should be. 

“Sorry,” Gerard says first. “I shouldn’t have—I don’t know what came over me.”

Their mutual embarrassment is palpable, thick enough to cut with a knife. Jon thinks back to what Gerard said before, in jest, about acting like they’re in kindergarten. It’s painfully relevant now. “I’m sorry, too, Gerard,” Jon says. “Really. It was juvenile of me.”

Gerard frowns. He says something, so softly that Jon doesn’t catch it. “What?”

“Gerry,” he says, louder this time. “Can you call me Gerry? I hate Gerard. It’s too stuffy.”

Jon thinks it’s bizarre to have gone to nickname terms because of a fight, but he nods numbly. “Gerry?” he tries. “Jon’s fine.”

“Jonny?” Gerry asks, eyebrows lifting.

“Absolutely not,” Jon says sharply.

“If you say so, Mr Sims, sir,” Gerry leans back on his palms. He nudges Jon’s shin with his foot; Jon kicks back. From behind his brightly-coloured library book, Michael Shelley makes an exaggerated retching noise, and the two of them, in perfect sync, turn to glare at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for some reason i fretted so much over this chapter while writing it. but it is here now. in whatever state you have found it in
> 
> if you are reading this hello and thank you <3 this is like maybe the longest thing i’ve written (ever? wow!) and it’s been greatly fun but also mostly because of the nice things you guys have said about it! if you’ve commented, we are now married please remember to pick our kids up from soccer practice i love you


	9. Going Down To Liverpool

Before she’d died, his mother had been a doctor of some sort, and now when Jon’s grandmother speaks to him she hints, often, that it would be nice for him to consider her legacy. He was very young before the accident. Now he isn’t quite sure he remembers what sort of doctor his mother was. Besides, he has no intention at all of following those footsteps, cut off as they were in the middle of their road. He wonders sometimes if she had slipped away slowly enough that she could identify exactly what organs had ceased their duty, pinpoint what process had been pierced through its middle and rendered unworkable. No, he doesn’t believe that he’d like to be a doctor, at all.

Although a year or so ago he’d thought he would try to believe. The school had opened sign ups for a Biomedical Olympiad; he was studious enough to be doing well in his Bio class, like most of his others, and passed the preliminary testing with no hitch. He did so along with three other students, girls who likely did want to be doctors and probably would in due time. Most of them never spoke to him. It was just as well.

He hadn’t counted on the work being quite so tricky. Some words he’d never seen before in his life. He wrote them down in a flimsy jotter book with explanations in the line underneath and imagined once that his mother was the one telling him the meanings, reading them aloud to him. He realised then that he didn’t really remember her voice. He did not imagine it again.

During one of the training sessions the girl next to him noticed him furiously penning terms in his notebook and said, wanly, when he’d put down his pen: “So you’ll want to be a doctor when you grow up, too?”

Jon looked at her, surprised. She was leaning back in her seat, and turned to him now, putting one brown-skinned arm over the back of her chair to regard him with not much interest at all. He thought that possibly she was in his class. “No,” he said, surprising himself again. He’d meant to say yes.

She perked up. “Really? Didn’t expect to hear that. I don’t, either.” Her voice had a Liverpool lilt, obviously not one she’d had the time to drown yet. “Not to geg in, but what’d you want to be, then?”

He thought about it. “Something in academia? If that doesn’t work out I’d like to do anything interesting, at least. Hate to be bored.”

The girl grinned. She was good at that, peculiar and genuine in a way Jon hadn’t felt before, maybe because people rarely grinned at him. “I don’t think anyone likes being bored.”

“Are you certain? There are people out there becoming mathematicians as we speak.”

She laughed, and Jon felt himself grow inexplicably warm with accomplishment, but she leapt to the defense of mathematics right after: “You know, it’s not all counting numbers with what they do. Some of it is fascinating stuff.”

Jon couldn’t imagine anything fascinating to do with maths as a profession. “Like what?” he asked.

“Prime numbers?” she tried.

“Prime numbers,” he repeated, the world’s youngest professional skeptic.

“I love prime numbers,” she confessed. If he could have wrapped a prime number up in cellophane and brought it to her door, he would have. The teacher arrived, six minutes late, and they turned back to attention, Jon upset with the realisation that he hadn’t asked her what she’d like to do when she grew up, or learned her name. He could never run a perfect circle around these social graces. It was more than social graces; he wanted to know.

For the next hour he did very well not to look over at her. She was wearing the ash-gray version of the school jumper that he didn’t see that often, and her hair was dark and cropped to a densely close cloud. As she was working on a question her head rested in the hand that was idle.

Her name was Georgie Barker. He learned it after the next training session, and she his. Additionally: she was second-generation British, one off from Jon, her parents having immigrated from Nigeria. Yes, she was a Scouser, was it that obvious? (Kinda). In the bit of silence that followed, he’d absentmindedly started the chorus to Going Down to Liverpool under his breath, and she’d sputtered in disbelief and mock offense. Later, they would sing it together on the way out of school, Jon wheeling his bicycle, Georgie walking beside with her hands laced behind her back.

Thus they became familiar with each other. Georgie took to the Olympiad like a duck to water, better than Jon, could see what seemed like every catch in the wording of a question designed to trick you into a wrong answer. He got better just studying with her, like her brightness was a germ he could catch. The national segment of the competition came and went, and Georgie was the only one from their school who went on to the international.

He was at home, paying half his attention to a hare-brained program about ancient aliens, when his mobile rang. The sound of it scared the skin nearly off his bone. He didn’t hear it all that often. He got up to retrieve his phone and saw on its display who was calling: Georgie, in lowercase, with a small icon of a ghost beside the name, the way she had typed it into his phone a month or so earlier. He answered.

“Jonathan Sims speaking,” he said, like the senior citizen he was at his core. He nearly swore when he realised how ridiculous he sounded.

“Georgina Barker also speaking,” she responded, mirthful. “Have you seen The Hobbit?”

It took him a moment to realise that she was asking about the movie and not an individual Hobbit that she had misplaced. “No,” said Jon, wishing that he had. “I’ve read the book, though.”

“Bloody typical of you,” Georgie teased. She was silent for a second before she revealed her own hypocrisy. “I haven’t seen the movie either. I think I might have to, though. They’re taking us to the set tomorrow.”

“Is that the most impressive of New Zealand’s tourist attractions?” Jon said, highly critical. He was standing already and figured that he might as well get himself something to drink. Pinning the phone between his ear and a lifted shoulder, he opened the fridge and searched it through.

“There was a geyser today. And a”—a pause and a sound of effort like she was leaping from one hotel bed to another, paired with the soft thump of a bounce—“Maori heritage trail. I’m sorry, I sound like I’m gloating.”

“Carry on gloating,” encouraged Jon. He’d been secretly relieved when his biomedical escapade had been cut short at the national stage, and told her as much. He selected a carton and poured himself some chocolate milk. “I don’t mind.”

“The wifi in our room is terrific,” she supplied. “I was supposed to be osmosising the question bank tonight, but I think the room is too nice to be polluted by studying.”

Jon considered this. “I think it would be active transport. Not osmosis. Since you know so much already.” He shut the fridge door with his heel.

There was a silence at the other end as the nerdiness of his own words sank into Jon. When Georgie spoke again, her voice was giddy. “Where’d you learn to say things like that?” she asked. “You’ve gone and made my night.”

He didn’t have any idea how to reply to that, so he took a thrilled sip of his milk and said, “Did you know that the reason why Mayan mathematics was so sophisticated is because they learned it from aliens? Allegedly.”

“I did,” Georgie said, just as thrilled. “And look, I’m no skeptic, but that’s all proper horseshit.”

“This lad on the telly is dead serious about the extraterrestrial intervention.”

“Lad on the telly probably thinks that African is a language.”

Jon snorted before he could stop himself. “And that Mesoamericans couldn’t count by themselves.”

“Right?” There was more flopping from Georgie’s end, the muffled sounds of a soft mattress being appreciated to the fullest. “I don’t see what’s so hard to believe about a culture developing their own systems and ideas. Colonisers think they’re the only ones who ever had complex thoughts. Everything’s aliens with them.”

“Everything is aliens,” Jon said gravely. “It was aliens, and is aliens now, and right after you die and are buried aliens are going to dig up your corpse and take it away.”

Georgie laughed. “I’m aliens too!” she added with the intensity of a fourteen-year-old spawning an inside joke. “I’m digging up your corpse as! we! speak!”

“No!” cried Jon with the frantic disbelief of a fourteen-year-old latching onto the same inside joke.

“It’s too late. I’m going to bring your bones to my brethren, and we’re going to eat them together.” Georgie threatened. She sighed. “My roommate is taking forever to shower. I’ve called my parents already. It’s ridiculous.”

“Must be a nice bathroom.”

“I’m counting on it,” Georgie said. “With the combs you can steal, and soap that smells like grapefruit.”

Jon settled back onto the sofa. “Only the best bathrooms for Britain’s brightest.”

Another flop, like she was rolling over. “Wish you were my roommate. Bet you wouldn’t spend hours showering.”

“I’d be no use,” he reminded her. “Save...moral support?”

“Don’t say that,” she chided. “You’ve an excellent head on your shoulders. We would be a great team, especially since you’re actually willing to talk to me.”

“I’m guessing the roommate situation is bleak?”

“It’s awful,” Georgie crowed. “And she took the bed with the charging port. Oh, speak of the devil.” In the background of the call a door opened. “Alright, bye, love you.” She hung up.

He sat, in a stupor, for what felt like ages, holding his phone to his ear still. He hadn’t even had the chance to say anything back. On the screen of the television, the camera panned closer and closer to a carved limestone figure that could have plausibly been of an alien.

They dated, in the loosest sense of the word. Georgie did commendably in the Olympiad, like Jon guessed she would, and by a miracle they didn’t drop immediately off into not talking once it was over. It was unlike anything else Jon had ever experienced. He had spent years with his head in books or worksheets while his peers ran around trading three-dimensional stickers with coloured water trapped inside and getting pushed off of playground equipment, and then grown into the later years of more books and worksheets while they grew into contact sports and gossip. Adults remarked often that his grandmother must be determined to see him do well in school—this was far from the truth. He would tell them that he studied without playing because he wanted to, that it was all him, with some pride and some melancholy.

But that year Georgie’s company had fallen into his lap like the most radiant birthday present to ever fall into a lap. They watched The Hobbit films together, at Georgie’s, and he shot forth into boredom like a bullet train by the third, but he never said so. She had a cat. Has a cat. It was with this cat that Jon developed the second defining friendship of his teenage years. They went out for frozen yogurt after school days (him and Georgie, not the cat). They passed sickeningly nerdy notes to each other in class, and studied together often, heads bent low as they labelled diagrams and cross-referenced textbooks and powerpoint slides. Once, when he’d fallen into a half-lucid doze over his Chemistry revision, she had stood from her seat to lean over and placed a mute, chaste kiss at the junction of his temple.

Sometimes Jon thinks about this and is socked by the inevitable nostalgia that comes with remembering. There are newspaper articles that he longs to show her. Daft theories he knows she would be ecstatic about. Last year is long gone, though, and Jon knows, also, that the state of the lonesome is a book that he has read before and will have to read, again, like a Leitner that eats you in and then out before you have the time to wisen up and hurl it into the Thames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it is; 3am. suffice to say that this chapter is in a state au naturel


	10. Canis Major

Jon has weighed the pros and cons and ruled against biking home before the show starts. He’s never keen on risking lateness, not anymore, and is anyway of the strong belief that Sasha doesn’t care whether he appears in his school uniform or not. For image’s sake, he pops by a restroom before to wash his face, tucks his shirt back into his pants, and after a moment of intense deliberation, undoes his topmost button for the barest sense of hipness.

In the mirror he practices schooling his features into polite interest. No—was that more indifference? He lifts his eyebrows a little higher. That would do nicely. He does it a few more times to ingrain the memory of it, well-equipped now for any a cappella solos or attempts at stand-up comedy he might have to endure tonight.

He lingers in the library for a little bit, but his homework is long done and Gerry has vanished, likely at home, spending centuries smearing the perfect density of burgundy under his eyes. Jon flips through the Sanskrit tome from Leitner’s collection to pass the time. He hasn’t magically learned Sanskrit since Gerry first brought the book in. He stares instead at the bookplate, runs the pad of his thumb over the damning ink.

Eventually the sun begins to set and his watch tells him that doors open in five minutes. He hides the Leitner (bit of blind superstition) and locks up, wheels his bicycle with his schoolbag hanging from the handlebars to the bike stand near the entrance to the school and chains it there. There are students trickling back to the school, in a variety of dress, talking or surveying the clusters of balloons, newly strung up in greens and whites.

“Ticket?” says the girl at the table outside the auditorium when she sees him standing around waiting. The badge by her tie identifies her as prefectorial board, Cane. Jon shakes his head in panic and stands around further away, so as to not be misconstrued.

He doesn’t see Sasha until she’s nearly in front of him, waving to get his attention. He blinks and waves back, squinting. She’s wearing a jacket and a skirt, both denim, though artfully different in colours to disguise this fact, and her hair is Dutch-braided in two brown ropes. Jon feels abruptly underdressed. His only accessory is his schoolbag, slung over one shoulder.

“Love the outfit,” Sasha says when she reaches him. “Classic.”

“Thank you,” Jon says, smoothing down a crease in his school shirt. “Shall we?”

“We shall.” She takes their tickets from the pocket of her jacket and strips them apart, handing Jon his. It looks deliberately retro, the colour of American money, the words MAGNUS NIGHT curling in dark print on the paper. “Big fan of the vibe they’re projecting here.”

“Me too,” Jon says, having barely registered the vibe. He glances around, arrested by a sudden self-consciousness, as Sasha joins the gathering queue at the counter to get her ticket stamped. He’s not overly familiar with this scene, where his peers frolic in groups he can’t make sense of, talking about nothing. It is even more bizarre to him outside of school hours. As they draw closer to the front of the line, they can hear the girl behind the counter as she chats up the queue, which seems to be an inexhaustible chain of people she knows.

Sasha is not exempt from this extensive acquaintance web. “Glad you could make it, James,” she greets when they reach. She gives Sasha’s ticket a crisp stamp. “And...” With a start Jon realises she’s looking at him. Her eyes are black, and Jon feels caught, pinned in place like an unfortunate fly.

“Jon?” he says like he has to confirm with his brain that it is in fact his name. He holds his green ticket out to be stamped.

“I heard you designed the tickets,” Sasha says. “They’re pure class.”

“Thank you! Nice to be appreciated. In you go,” ushers the prefect whose name is Cane, and Jon follows Sasha into the velvet darkness of the auditorium, the sound of the girl at the counter striking up another conversation with yet more people she somehow is familiar with fading to a soft murmur behind them.

Jon has only been in here for school-wide briefings and speeches of varying quality. Transformed as it is for the occasion, Jon stops feeling underdressed and starts feeling basically stark naked. He and Sasha pass a lights display on their way to their seats, and it throws them into shifting hues like the inside of an unpolished emerald. Faint music is being piped through the speakers, settling over them in a perfume of well-loved oldies. They find their places. In the low light Jon doesn’t recognise the girl already in the seat beside him until she says, somewhat strangled, “No way.”

He turns his head to see. He can just barely make out the pinched face of Melanie King, black eyebrows down in despondent lines. She’s set down a neon-tab-ravaged book that Jon is sure she cannot possibly read in the dimness. As if this seating miracle couldn’t get any worse, the person one more seat down pokes her head out to see what’s gotten Melanie’s knickers atwist. It’s Georgie.

“Good evening,” says Jon, incredibly distressed. To avoid looking at anybody at all he tests his theory and tries to make out the printed words on Melanie’s open book. In her disbelief she seems to have lost her place; the pages have flipped themselves nonchalantly to the very start of the book, where there are no words but the dark rectangle smudge of an indistinct bookplate or a library stamp grid on the inside cover. “A bit dark to be reading? Isn’t...it?”

“Spectacular evening,” Melanie agrees. “And none of your business.”

“Hi,” Georgie says. It turns out a great relief for both of them when she doesn’t say anything else.

Sasha, the saint herself, gives Jon’s shirt a quick tug. _Swap?_ she mouths, and Jon nearly breaks his neck nodding. They execute the exchange with a brief scuffle of feet. He imagines her canonisation with no small amount of gratefulness: St Sasha of the essential faux pas. Clearly, Melanie, too, is thrilled with their lack of tact. She and Sasha strike up some instant chat.

“So technically we did get to go together,” Jon hears Melanie say. “Best of both worlds.” He’s certain this is what her sarcasm sounds like. They end up sitting in alternating bouts of silence and idle conversation until the show starts. Melanie bows her head, to all appearances reading her unreadable book, fingertips trailing over pages blank in the dark.

The last lights at the back of the auditorium dim, and a pair of chipper emcees emerge to present the evening’s lineup. The audience ripples into silence as the curtains part for the first act. To what seems like everybody’s delight, it’s a younger girl with her spectacularly well-trained Doberman pinscher. Sasha grabs her phone, thrilled, to get a video for Martin.

After a couple minutes of hoop-jumping and feats of remarkable balance, Jon wonders, “Wouldn’t the dog deserve the prize more?”

“What’s a dog going to do with two hundred and fifty pounds?” Sasha points out.

“I mean,” says Jon. He does not follow this up with anything that he means. The dog falls backward from the gun of the girl’s thumb and pointer, cracked belly-up by an imaginary bullet. The crowd cheers with relish.

The rest of the evening’s performances are slightly less memorable. Someone paints a portrait of the queen blindfolded. One gimmicky card magic show. Another gimmicky card magic show. Intermission. (We have popcorn stands set up, if you would just head on outside!) Neither Jon nor Sasha heads on outside.The lights go up, and Melanie finally has enough to read her book by. 

“Still reading?” Sasha asks about ten minutes in.

“Finished it already,” Melanie explains. “Just revisiting.”

“It’s a pretty good book.”

“Yeah. Liked the part where the ginger got beheaded. Served him right.”

“Jack? Beheaded?” Sasha echoes. “I don’t remember reading that.”

“Are you sure? Hang on, I’ll find it.” Melanie starts to flip through the pages, hell-bent, but the lights die away before she can locate the scene. The emcees return, chipper as ever, and at the edge of Jon’s vision, Melanie puts her book away with some irritation. 

When the first act after the intermission commences, a vaguely-familiar boy that may or may not have been in one of Jon’s classes takes the stage. He doesn’t bring anything with him, and goes straight for the mic, which, patently, is not a good sign. “So, how’s everybody tonight?” is his opener. The crowd around Jon and Sasha gives a bland _Woooooo_. Jon is starting to harbour a very, very bad feeling about this.

“I think I need to use the loo,” Sasha announces suddenly, standing. Jon pulls his legs in to let her pass. A minute or so of talking elapses in her absence. By now, it’s clear that this performance is supposed to be stand-up comedy, carried out by a less-than-promising fifteen-year-old comedian. Jon begins to envy Sasha’s escape.

He bears it for a couple more minutes before he takes his own flight, graciously stepping over knees to get down the aisle. When he’s out, he has to resist the urge to break into a sprint out of the double doors. His departure is punctuated by an “And we all know what they say in Scotland…” Jon does not know what they say in Scotland and has no wish to stay to find out.

Outside, the sun is nearly entirely down, pillars casting long blue shadows in the bruised twilight. He quickens his pace to the restrooms and nearly runs right into Sasha, on her way out. “Is it over?” she asks, voice full of hope.

He gives a tight little grimace at her question. She mirrors his expression down to the flattening of his eyebrows. “Well, shit. Is it tolerable?”

Jon pulls together a listless shrug. “I don’t actually need the loo.”

“Ha. Great minds, huh?” 

“Thinking quite alike.”

“We can sit down.” Sasha doesn’t wait for him to assent, sitting and sprawling on a bench set aside to make space for the popcorn stand. The boy presiding over the popcorn eyes them curiously as Jon joins her, perching beside.

“I have nothing against stand-up,” Sasha clarifies. “I just have a sixth sense for if it’s going to be good or not.”

“That’s useful,” Jon says. 

She smiles, sweetly sardonic, and gives one of her braids a distracted yank. “Insanely so. You have no idea.”

“Gotta keep that on your resume. It’s powerful stuff.” Jon strains his ears to listen for any indication of the passage of acts from the auditorium. Sasha, judging from the way she inclines her head, does the same.

They’re rewarded by the muffled electric purr of a guitar. The emcee is loud enough to be heard from outside: _Introducing Mikaele and the Michaels!_ The two of them brighten instantly.

“Great. I might use the loo first, actually, just in case,” Jon says. “You can go on back.”

“Oh, no. I’ll wait for you, don’t fret.” Sasha leans back in the bench, head to the wall. Jon, out-of-practice, tries his best to smile his thanks.

He ducks into the restroom and blinks when the lights flicker on at his entry. The air freshener hisses out something woodsy. The automatics have always left him slightly disconcerted, and sometimes he can’t help the thought that the lav itself is some kind of sentient thing, eyes opening sleepily at his presence. 

Especially now. He casts a glance over his shoulder that does little to soothe his sudden nerves. Even inside the lavatory, the band’s music is loud enough to be heard if Jon strains to hear it. The tune is familiar, but he can’t quite make it out. 

When he’s done he crosses the tiles to the sink side, rinses his hands over a basin gleaming on account of being attached to a first-floor lavatory frequented by esteemed guests to the school who may be inclined to be swayed by gleaming basins. The loo on the floor where Jon’s classroom was had at one point seen three generations of discreet rat tenants before someone called pest control. (Jon to Georgie: “There are rats in the boys’ toilet.” “Jon, I know you don’t like our classmates, but—” “I mean _actual_ rats.”)

He watches the last of the soap swirl down the drain and runs a wet hand through his hair. It stands to attention, droplets caught like crystals. He leans in, moves to flatten a section of darker hair over the lick of silver at his temple. He surveys himself with careful calculation before he goes still. The back of his neck prickling, he lets his gaze travel slowly up. Water drips from his forehead onto the porcelain. 

Someone, or something, is standing right behind him, silent. Jon doesn’t breathe. The only sound is the music from the auditorium, soft as if from far underwater.

It’s nearly twice his height. It’s built crooked, like its spine has been broken and mended in several separate places. He looks it in the face in the mirror; it’s blank as an unfired bullet, features plain and staring but human. Just below the stretched swan-long neck, where a shoulder should be, is an animal’s head, snout black, maw pink and cracked mid-laugh. But with no sound still.

Above Jon’s head is a series of exit wounds riddled into its torso. Through its form, lucent and unearthly in the mirror, Jon can see the doors of the cubicles. It’s standing, bizarrely, on all fours—but that isn’t right either, because it has another set of pale, humanoid arms. There’s a flicker of movement as the thing begins to raise a pallid hand.

His terror sharp enough that it feels like excitement, Jon whips around. It works well enough in the movies. It does in real life, too, because he is alone. When he turns back to the mirror it is empty save for him. The apparition is nowhere to be seen.

He’s breathing hard when he hurtles out of the restroom. Sasha sits up when she sees him. “Woah, no need to rush.”

“Did you see—” he starts, scraps it. “Did anyone pass by—”

“No? What’s the matter?”

Jon stops short, unwilling to be categorised as someone who sees spectres in bathroom mirrors. Faintly he realises that the music has stopped. Maybe Gerry will have a recording. “It’s nothing. Thought I saw somebody.” It’s the truth, mostly. “Let’s—”

He trails off again, eyes moving past Sasha to the shape of a person pushing aside the curtain of streamers at the open door to step out. Sasha follows his gaze and looks over her shoulder.

It’s Melanie. In the white fluorescence she’s cast in stark relief, all five feet and two inches of her: black hair pasted close to her skull, thin strands glued to her forehead. She’s holding something in her hand. Her shoes are gone, inexplicably, and her football socks, once a colour that was not red, are pulled just below kneecaps torn to the colour of salmon.

Jon and Sasha stare, slack-jawed, as she moves toward them with a dazed sway. Her feet leave wet, scarlet shapes on the floor. By now it’s clear what she’s bathed in. She wipes blood out of her eyes. Jon isn’t surprised when he squints and sees that the thing she’s holding is her book, warped and drenched dark with its neon array of tabs still clinging on for dear life. 

“Not mine,” says Melanie by way of explanation. “Don’t worry.” She passes them, on her own drifting journey to somewhere else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things will be Weird from here on out


	11. Cow-Eyed

The next people come out in twos and threes, mostly barefoot, some speckled, others dripping. Every one of them is silent and slightly vacant. A girl, heedless of Jon in the fringe of her way, bumps past him, leaving him a gift of scarlet on his sleeve. 

“Are you seeing this?” says Sasha urgently in his ear. He nods, feeling as absent as the scattered audience seems. Despite how hard he looks, he can’t pick out any visible injury on the people streaming out the exit. Sasha’s scanning the crowd too, clearly on the same track as him.

“My bag’s still inside,” Jon says after he fails to pinpoint a source for the last time. “Hang on.”

“I’m coming with you. I want to know what the hell happened.”

“Come on, then.” They weave through the exodus, Sasha gripping his wrist to stay connected. The air inside the auditorium is thick with the copper of blood. Jon wrinkles his nose as they pick their way to where they’d sat only a dozen or so minutes ago. Most of the audience has vacated, or is in the middle of doing so.

His bag is still there. Predictably spotted with red. The bottom of it is wet and dark, like it itself has bled out its insides. With his uniform already a bit bloody, he swings his bag onto his back with little concern. “Everybody seems...fine.”

“Exactly,” Sasha concurs. “So whose blood is it?”

“I’ve heard of death metal bands that pour animal blood on their audience.” Even as he says it Jon knows that this is worlds away from a concert stunt. “Could be that.”

They share an unconvinced glance before they join the trickle of people back outside. The sedated flow of students is enough to keep them equally calm. Jon can practically hear gears screeching and turning in Sasha’s brain.

“Why isn’t anybody freaking out?” she wonders out loud. Jon has no answers for her. In perfect time, a familiar face bobs into view in front of them, turning sideways to get past two bloodied show-goers, clearly freaking out.

“Oh, Christ, thank God, Jesus,” Martin sputters. He’s pristine, wearing a pair of glasses that Jon has never seen, fogged like he’s just left a cold room. He has a folder of work tucked under one arm. When he reaches Sasha he fumbles to slip it into his tote bag and then drops both hands onto her shoulders, eyes wheeling over her to check for any blood or injury.

“Hi, Martin. I’m _fine_ ,” she reassures him. “I think everyone is? It’s bloody peculiar. Pun intended.”

His mouth twists crossly at the play on words, like a disapproving parent. Then he blindsides Jon by stepping past Sasha and placing his hands on _his_ shoulders. He turns Jon gently this way and then that way, notices the bloodied schoolbag, and says with alarm, “Is that your blood?”

“No,” Jon says, startled. Martin examines him the way he examined Sasha, his gaze warm and concerned. They lock eyes—Martin’s got two neat rows of brown eyelashes that frame his bottom lids—and Jon blinks thrice in quick, panicked beats. Martin releases him suddenly, as if remembering that Jon isn’t his friend to be cared about. Jon stops thinking about blood and starts thinking about Homeric epithets concerning cows.

“We were outside when it happened,” Sasha explains. “I think it was the Michael band that did it.”

Martin turns to her, bewildered. “The Michael band,” he repeats. His eyes wander to something over Jon’s shoulder. “Them?”

Like a familiar, red-soaked chimera, a shape staggers out of the auditorium. This is less because of the state of either of its constituents’ motor coordination and more because of the fact that the two of them have over twenty-five centimeters between their respective heights. The taller half has his face turned away from the other; he’s saying something to the massive boy walking solo beside them, a caseless blue electric guitar slung over his back. The shorter half looks content being hauled along.

Crew notices them first. He lifts his head and manages to look suitably unimpressed from behind five litres of A positive blood. Gerry, who he’s connected to via several arms around several shoulders and waists, concludes his banter with the other boy to take a look at what’s got Crew’s attention. He picks up the pace a little, clearly to Crew’s dismay. 

Shelley is just behind, at his own infuriating amble. He’s as blond and spotless as ever, which is fortunate, because the Saint Laurent jumper he’s wearing was made of alpaca wool in 1990 and belonged to his mother, who has not yet realised that her son should be in his forties. Jon is too busy thinking about cow epithets to examine how he knows this fact. For whatever reason, as Shelley walks, he’s calling, “Eric! Hey, Eric!” after Gerry and Crew, neither of whom are named Eric.

Gerry takes a second to glance over his shoulder and size Shelley up. He doesn’t seem to come to any earth-shaking conclusion, because he turns back forward and drags Crew along to meet Jon and the other two.

“Missed their show?” Gerry says. “Looks like you did.” With his free hand he wipes blood from the hollow of his throat and reaches out to swipe it over Jon’s face. Jon stifles a shriek and dodges the second attempt, directed at the clean white front of his shirt.

“You absolute beast,” Jon says with emotion, an accusation straight out of the most overwrought of nineteenth-century novels, or, otherwise, the cattiest of reality TV programs. “Is it your blood?” He tries his best not to let concern creep into his tone.

“No,” Gerry assures him. He tilts his head like he’s computing a mental sum. “I think it’s Crew’s.”

“You jest?” Crew asks, but the phrase is too brief for anybody to realise that he’s doing his best Jon. He realises this and falls silent to recalculate when best to brandish this impression again.

“You have enough inside you, don’t worry,” Gerry says to him. “This outside blood is spare.”

Crew says, “Pretty concerning quantity of spare.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“I can’t see how it might be mine.”

“Try and play your screwed-up gig again and see what revelations that brings you.” Gerry adjusts his support of Crew, and for a short moment Crew is lifted, feet off the ground, by the shift. He makes a noise of displeasure before Gerry sets him back down. “Bloody typical. Pun intended.”

“What exactly happened?” Sasha asks. Jon looks from her to Gerard, relieved that someone has the presence of mind to ask relevant questions. 

The large boy, wringing blood out of his hair, says, “You had to be there.” Jon notes that his guitar is clean.

“What Salesa said,” Crew says.

“Evil music is what happened,” Gerry says, disgruntled. “We should get a picture. It’s not every day that you’re covered in blood.”

Martin, quiet for most of their bizarre exchange, says, “Um.” Of all of them, he seems the least likely to endorse Gerry’s idea, but to Jon’s surprise he digs through his tote for a couple of moments before producing a camera in a faded leather case. “If you want.”

Gerry brightens as if someone’s fired a flare behind his face. “Yessir.” To Crew: “Can you stand on your own?” (“Don’t think so.”) “Alright, like this is fine, then.”

Martin spins a dial on his camera and takes aim. Crew elbows Shelley out of the shot for not being similarly covered in blood. After the flash goes, the band and Gerry crowd round a flustered Martin to evaluate the photo. “Show us,” one of them says.

Martin falters. “It, uh, doesn’t work like that. You have to take it to get developed.”

“Oh, cool,” says Gerry, “old school.”

Martin eyes the camera still in his hands as if expecting it to start weeping blood, or wondering what the film shop will make of the grisly exposure he’s just captured. “Thanks?”

“Welcome. Well,” Gerry says, “We’ll be on our way. It might be in your best interest to be on yours, because I think Crew made something. I saw it leave while they were playing.”

“Leave?” Jon echoes, at the same time that Sasha says, “Made something?” They share a look. 

“Yes,” Gerry confirms without elaborating, knitting his brow into a frown. “Just don’t stay too long here. It should be gone by tomorrow. _If_ we’re lucky.”

“Was it about this tall?” Jon tiptoes to indicate a height way above his head and says in a whisper meant for Gerry but ultimately not very effective, what with the Michael connected to him and the four other people leaning in to listen. “With a dog about here?” He points to his shoulder.

“And holes,” Gerry adds.

“And holes,” Jon confirms.

“Yeah. I would tell you to stay away, but you sound like you’ve been up close and personal already.” He lists forward, towing Michael Crew along. “Good night.”

When the band is gone, trailing their blood, one of the last stragglers pops out of the auditorium, mostly dry. It’s Georgie. Jon shouldn’t be worried about seeing her, considering the fact that there are many more things to be worried about at hand (e.g. the frankly comical amount of sourceless blood that has recently materialised), but he still freezes.

“Have you seen Melanie?” she asks. There’s a fleck of crimson on her cardigan.

“I think she went that way.” Sasha gestures in a direction swarmed over with bloodied teenagers. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I should call my dad?”

Georgie grimaces. It puts a familiar dimple in her cheek. She turns to Jon, who would really rather that she turn to anybody else, and says, “Can I use your phone? Mine’s dead. I’ll only be a minute.”

“Um, yeah, hang on,” Jon says. He sets his schoolbag down and begins to search for his mobile. Over his head, Georgie and Martin make surprisingly easy conversation.

“Bloody good show,” Georgie says. “Pun intended.”

“You know, not the first time I’ve heard that variety of sentence tonight,” says Martin, equally vexed and amused.

“Aw. Tough crowd.” 

Below, Jon says, with feeling, “ _Fuck_.” The hand that he’s rooting inside his bag with stops rooting. He’s just recalled where exactly he left his phone last. This last place is not, as he’d dearly hoped, his bag.

He looks up. Martin looks like a man who has recently been shot. Georgie, who, from his experience, can swear better than Jon, is unfazed. “I, uh. Don’t have my phone with me.”

“Oh. I hope you find it,” Georgie says, clearly as awkward with Jon as he is with her. “Thanks anyway.”

“You can use mine,” Martin offers. Jon feels secretly bitter as Georgie accepts the phone and dials.

Once she’s handed it back to Martin and dissolved into the crowd, Jon decides it’s his turn to hit the gas. “I have to go find my phone.”

“You know where it is?” Martin asks.

Jon gives a grim nod. “I had it last in the lab today. We were taking photomicrographs.” He turns to take off, but Martin pulls him back.

“You can’t go alone,” he insists, his voice absurdly, genuinely, horrified. “You heard what that guy said about...about the…”

“You believe him?” Jon says in a tone that he meant to be derisive, but it comes out a shade too weak and undecided himself. Martin’s responding expression is so wretched that Jon feels himself soften a little bit. “It’s not anything. I’ll just pop in and grab it and be back down in five minutes at most.” He wiggles his wrist in a way that he hopes will convince Martin to dislodge himself from it.

“Then I’ll follow you,” Martin says. “Five minutes can’t hurt. Anyway, you might get lost. Without...me…?”

Jon isn’t convinced, but he manages to extricate his arm. “Can’t stop you, I suppose. Let’s go.”

They move like a pair of brisk-walking ghosts, up deserted staircases and into the waiting second floor. Martin shines light on their path from his own phone. By the fifth minute, it’s clear that this is not going to be a five-minute job.

“Jon—”

“I know the way,” Jon says. By the beacon of Martin’s makeshift flashlight, he can see the drab stretch of corridor ahead of him, down to the artificial ferns in reflective white pots. 

“I might have to disagree with you, because this is the exact same hallway we started in,” Martin says. “There’s the staircase we came up from.” He sweeps his beam over to illuminate the stairs, leaving Jon in momentary darkness. “And this is the same notice board.” In the beam is a familiar array of posters and advertisements.

“That’s not possible,” Jon says. “We didn’t turn back or anything.”

“I know. Sometimes the second floor is just like that.”

“I’m aware. I hoped it would be more navigable at night.” Jon studies a square notice that says _HAVE YOU SEEN MY AIRPODS? Call this number._

Martin huffs a disbelieving laugh. “What, you thought it would be asleep? Doesn’t make any…”

“Let’s _go_ ,” Jon urges, peeved.

Two more left turns drop them into a hallway with doors to old, drafty classrooms. Martin, the budding explorer, shines light on them as they pass, revealing three shallow furrows down one. “Someone was desperate to get to class.”

“Can’t relate,” Jon says dryly. He narrows his eyes at the end of the hallway, shrouded in darkness. They walk towards it, flashlight revealing their path metre by metre. There’s no sound besides their breathing.

Jon steps out of the corridor into a T junction of hallways. In the hallway perpendicular something is glowing with a cold light. Without thinking Jon seizes Martin and yanks him back into the corridor they came from, pressing his back flat against the wall in sudden terror. He fumbles for the phone in Martin’s hand and shuts off the flashlight.

They’re plunged into darkness. The glow in the perpendicular hallway is the only source of light, moving slowly and steadily down towards the point where the two hallways meet, where Jon and Martin are pressed against the wall in the shroud of the dark.

Jon can’t help but look as the glow passes them on its journey straight down the hallway. The thing is lit by its own curious light, red at an angle and ghostly white at another. This close, Jon can see where its waist meets dark, wet fur, slipping downward into the four legs of a canine. Its white human back is still studded with bullet holes.

It’s slow, and aimless, so it’s a good few minutes before it’s vanished out of sight and they can breathe normally again. Martin, apparently at the end of his rope after all the blood and the monster, says, “What the hell?”

“Tell yourself that this is all a very vivid dream, if that helps you,” Jon advises to hide the fact that his own heart is going at a hundred kilometres per hour. “Now come on. I think I know how to get to the lab.”

It takes him three senseless hallways to realise that Martin is looking at him funny. “Yes?”

“Nothing,” says Martin, who seems to have just realised that he’s been looking. “Just—do you do this a lot?”

“Hide from nightmare creatures?” Martin nods his signature up-and-down, like a frightened bobblehead. “No.”

At the end of the hall, Martin’s phone beam casts light down a new corridor, familiar in a good way this time. “Oh, thank God.”

Nothing is glowing in the lab, so they inch their way into the dark interior, past dormant microscopes and vials of unidentifiable solutions. “Where’d you leave your—”

Jon’s thoughts roar with static. He grabs Martin and dives to the safety beneath a lab bench, displacing a couple of stools, just as the lights in the lab come on. Martin clings to his hand in terror. Jon is too afraid not to cling back.

Nobody calls out for a response. Not a teacher or a lab assistant. Jon is still blinking the spots out of his eyes from the sudden flood of light. Martin, showcasing a remarkable bout of courage, twists around to peer past the back of the bench that their backs are up against. He twists back almost immediately.

“It’s here,” he whispers. With a shudder he squeezes his eyes closed and executes a swift symbol of the cross on his chest with four fast touches. He clasps his palms together briefly in a wordless prayer.

There’s a crash of glass falling. Jon clings closer to Martin on instinct, like a child with a security blanket. In any other circumstance he would be mortally embarrassed. Martin lets him. When nothing else in the lab breaks, Jon loosens his hold on Martin’s arm. 

They sit with bated breath for what feels like ages. Jon, feeling some semblance of bravado seep back into him, pushes himself up and turns to peek over the top of the lab bench.

The creature is at the front of the lab, toying with the equipment. Jon watches it with horrified fascination as it raises a stoppered bottle of liquid. The animal on its shoulder—a hyena, or something along those lines—snaps at its arm. Jon watches for a second too long.

The creature turns. Jon whips back under the bench, heart racing. “I think it saw me,” he confesses in a barely-audible rush.

“What?” Martin says. “Oh, dear Lord.”

There’s a screech of wooden legs across linoleum as the creature moves lab furniture out of the way. Jon knows in his core that it is coming for them. The part of him that is yelling at him to run is yelling too softly to be heard over the fear. He has never been religious, but he’s suddenly tempted to pray to something, to anything.

From where they’re hiding, they can see a pair of front legs step into view, black with fur and slick with a liquid with an identity that Jon can guess. It’s fully solid, not the spectral thing he’d glimpsed in the bathroom mirror, not anymore. Jon has a feeling that the ripping-apart it can deliver will be fully solid as well. He makes a mental note to never not listen to Gerry Keay. He has another feeling that he will not ever get the chance to not listen to Gerry Keay again.

While he juggles his double negatives, Martin has opened his eyes, evidently ready to confront his death with full lucidity. He raises his phone, clearly also ready to document said death on his socials.

“What’s your number?” Martin hisses instead. Jon’s mouth floats open.

“I—is this the time?” he hisses back.

“Tell me your number. Hurry!”

Jon figures that since they aren’t doing anything apart from waiting to die he might as well humour Martin. Martin ducks his head, face pinched in diligence as he punches in the digits that Jon dictates. He hits the last of the string and dials.

Across the lab, Jon’s phone begins to cry in earnest. The dog’s feet quiver in their place and disappear from view. The creature moves through the lab toward the sound of Jon’s ringtone, stools crashing like gunshots as it knocks them over. Underneath the lab bench, next to his unlikely saviour, Jonathan Sims feels the strangest, most potent kick of a rapidly changing opinion of Martin Blackwood.

He’s too stunned to say anything of thanks. Martin is still solemn with concentration, his phone held to his ear like he’s expecting the creature to pick up and start a lively dialogue about the weather.

If Jon was surprised by the effectiveness of Martin’s idea, he’s smacked dead by the conclusion of his ringtone as something answers the call. Clearly Martin wasn’t expecting it either, because he inhales sharply.

An infinity of silence. “Hello?” Martin tries. Nothing.

“Can you hear me? Do you understand…”

He’s stopped by an unnatural baying that seems loud enough to fill the universe. It’s both low and high-pitched, the keen of a savaged animal in its dying throes. Martin yanks the phone away from his ear, wincing, like it’s his mother on the other end giving him an earful instead of a half-dog blight on the earth howling down it.

“Is that a yes?” Another wail. “Ah. Ah. Alright. I hope you understand me. You look human enough to.” Martin is gripping the phone with two hands, looking beseechingly at Jon even though he seems to have the situation under control (or as under control as a situation like this can get). “You’ve got to _leave_. To get out. Turn off the light and put the phone down before you go.”

Silence. The corner of Martin’s mouth quirks down, his brown eyes huge with terror. Jon feels like Zeus, staring into the face of a transformed Io. “Put down the phone. Leave.”

Martin tilts his head, squinting his eyes like it’ll help him hear better. A stool falls over in the distance. Jon and Martin look at each other, unsure if anything at all is going well. The creature’s footfalls are quiet, the step of a predator out of its grounds but silent as an open grave nonetheless. Closer to them, it knocks over another stool, sending a jolt through Jon.

Only when they hear its baying cry out in the hallway do they relax. Jon slumps back like Atlas off-duty for the first time in millenia. Martin manages a wheezy laugh. They sit under the bench, breathing hard, in disbelief at the turn of their fate. 

In the silence of the lab, when their breathing has eased out, Jon meets Martin’s gaze. Martin blinks like he’s staring into a very bright light. Jon, itching to break the silence, says, “You have cow eyes.”

Martin sits up. “Sorry?”

Jon remembers then why he’s not a fan of speaking his every thought. “I, uh. I swear it’s not an insult. Homer said it in the Iliad about Hera.” He’d read the Iliad, which precluded him from the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and really any ancient text in dactylic hexameter, because he hated reading what he felt like he’d read before. “As a compliment. I think...the Greeks...liked cows?”

“I like cows,” Martin says. He looks as mortified as Jon feels. “I. Um, I. Thanks.”

To salvage the situation, Jon stands up and crosses the lab. His phone is lying on the surface of the bench, teetering over the edge of the sink. When he picks it up his hand comes away red. Martin, close behind him and a little bit drunk on the danger of their encounter, says, “Bloody odd night.” He watches Jon run his hand under water from the sink. “Pun intended.”

Jon wipes the dried smear of blood from Gerry’s hand off his face and says, “Everybody thinks they’re so bloody funny.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: rooms full of people Fuck Count: 2  
> perpetrators:  
> elias: 1  
> jon: 1


	12. 451

It’s a clear day after school on a Tuesday when Georgie Barker catches up to Sasha on her way out of school, hands rending together behind her back in subdued distress, lip chapped and obviously worried at. “Hi,” says Georgie. (“Hi!” from Sasha.) The look of consternation on Georgie’s face condenses. It’s a face made to make expressions, and this one, too, is furrowed and skillfully wrought. “Are you taking the Tube? Or the bus?”

“I’m taking the Tube,” Sasha replies, removing her earbuds and stowing her wires in the pocket of her uniform. “Why? Are you?”

“Oh, great. So am I.” Georgie casts a look over her shoulder. “Look, you’re in the library a lot, right?”

“Yeah, you could say so,” Sasha says. “Three days a week, at least.”

“And you read, or like, look through a lot of the books?”

Sasha thinks. “Not a _lot_. Most of the library books are ancient. Sometimes I sneeze too much to read a single page.”

“Oh. Well, have you happened across any weird ones?” Georgie asks. “Old means more likely to be haunted, right?”

“Weird ones?” Sasha gains the sense that Georgie is pulling her down a rabbit hole with each peculiar question. “As in supernatural? I wish.”

“As in supernatural.” Georgie is silent for one sheepish second. “This is going to sound absolutely ridiculous.”

Sasha, for one, is thrilled. “Lay it on me.”

They turn left into the station, under a stately brick arch. A pair of younger Magnus students hurtles past them, shrieking. “I think Melanie’s book is cursed.”

“That book?” Sasha knows exactly which book Georgie is referring to. “Okay. Tell me more.”

Georgie’s relief is plain on her face. “She doesn’t ever put it down. Ever. And not because she’s reading it, she finished it ages ago, she just has to have it with her.” Now that the dam has collapsed, Georgie surges on. “A few days ago she got into another fight. She didn’t even put it down. She just went straight for that kid, that bloody Lord of the Flies still attached to her like some kind of third arm.” A pause. “She got suspended, by the way.”

“Christ almighty,” Sasha says. “Did you try reading it?” Only after she has said it does it occur to her that this is the course of action that kills you in the horror movie.

“No,” Georgie says, appalled, proving that Georgie Barker is, in fact, the final girl that Sasha isn’t. “Okay, I know that doesn’t give me any evidence, but I’ve heard her talk about the plot. It is way off from the plot I read. Which is the actual plot, I checked Wikipedia and Sparknotes.”

“I noticed that,” says Sasha. “According to her, Jack gets beheaded.”

“And they fight to the death, more than once.”

Sasha says, “I want to read this book.”

“Sasha, no!” Georgie chides. “You’ll start fistfighting everyone, or something.”

“If you want to be sure it’s cursed, reading it’s the best way,” Sasha points out. “And you can rip it away from me if I start turning into a werewolf.”

Georgie chews at her lip, obviously not on board. “I was thinking of just destroying it and hoping Melanie gets better.”

“Oh, definitely,” Sasha says. “But I want to take a look first. Y’know, I dream about looking at cursed books all day every day.”

Despite herself, Georgie quirks an exasperated smile. “Thanks for believing me. I wasn’t even sure if I believed myself.”

“Well, I like to pride myself on my believing. And considering the talent show, nothing’s too outrageous anymore,” Sasha admits.

Georgie is silent, and when Sasha gives her a furtive look, her eyes have unfocused, coasting freely on some faraway plane. “Right...”

“The talent show?” Sasha reminds her. “It was pretty memorable? Lots of ghastly fluids?”

“Fluids,” Georgie repeats blankly. “Right. Yeah.”

Sasha decides against pressing the issue. This isn’t the first conversation of this variety she’s had in the past few weeks; her peers all tend to go soupy in the eyes when she makes any mention of the show, like a house suddenly filling with fog. She’s made her peace with it. “Anyway. You think the book is what makes Melanie lose her marbles?”

The lights come back on in Georgie’s expression. “Yep. I mean, it’s just a guess,” she says. “But she never hurt anyone before she started carrying it around. Not like she was an angel, just not physically confrontational. Now she’s like a junior MMA fighter.”

“How many, um, incidents has it been?”

Georgie sucks in the inside of her cheek. “Two serious. A few not serious. The latest twat deserved what he got, though. Sorry, was that mean?”

“I heard one of them had to go to the ER.”

Georgie nods. “And this other kid’s nose will never be the same.”

“But such a boost to his street cred.”

Georgie can’t resist a smile, but presses her lips together to exorcise it in respect for the forever-altered nose bridge of Melanie’s victim. “Bang on. They’re talking about expelling Melanie if she doesn’t improve, though. And my mum already thinks she’s a bad influence.” Her face darkens. “Which she is not. It’s just this book. I know it.”

“Here’s my plan,” Sasha says. “You’ll nab the book during school tomorrow. Get someone to distract her? And then drop by the library once school’s out, and we can figure out what to do with it.” It’s midday, but Sasha feels her spine buzz with a shiver of anticipation. “Wow. This is fun.”

“Fun because you get the easy job.”

“She’s more likely to send me to the ER than she is to send you,” reasons Sasha. “I like my nose just fine.”

Georgie huffs; the train pulls into the station, red doors slinking past them to a stop. “Right. I’ll do my best.”

Gerard Keay has not been in school for one week and two days.

Jon doesn’t know this—Gerry’s in the year above, and therefore traces his school life through different classrooms and hallways, separate from Jon except for their afternoons, which converge like ley lines at the landmark of the library. When the space between Gerry’s library visits stretches into a lapse with no end in sight, Jon starts looking without admitting to himself that he’s looking.

He checks the seat at the back behind the last shelves (nobody, not even junior members slacking). Raises his head too quickly every time the chime at the door moves (never Gerard). Considers writing a polite, if annoyed email to ask if Gerry has recently died (doesn’t).

Jon should be used to solitude and its dull stretches of afternoon. So it’s with a twinge of irritation that he discovers that he, impossibly, is bored. His brain pings around impatiently inside his head while he tries to summon long-learned formulas, and his master hand stills to a halt, leaving a wet, black blotch on the paper where the ink from the tip of his pen has pooled. There is no Gerry to fling himself into the chair beside Jon and complain about the minor grievances of his day. The absence of the distraction is equally distracting.

He’s in the middle of shelving on Wednesday when someone behind him clears their throat. Startled, he very nearly loses his footing on the stepladder, and hops off it to confront the culprit, his arms still full of dusty volumes.

It’s not Gerry, as he’d privately hoped. It’s his diminutive doppelgänger, in a neck brace. Michael Crew clears his throat like he has something important to say, and then fails to say it, staring at Jon with an unreadable expression instead. Most of his expressions are unreadable. This one, at least, is not malevolent.

“Is your neck alright?” Jon asks. It seems the decent thing to ask.

Michael doesn’t give a verbal reply, instead tilting his head to the side as far as the brace will allow him, eliciting a crack from some joint in his neck. “Fine.”

Jon stops staring in abject horror when it becomes clear that Michael’s neck is mostly functional. “Did you need anything?”

“Not really,” Michael says. “Listen—” he breaks off, trying and failing to scrounge his sentence back together. The two of them fall into a testy silence, blinking at each other like reluctant owls.

“Where _is_ he?” Jon says when he’s had enough of their stagnant quiet. The way Michael’s face changes, Jon knows he’s hit on the real point of this conversation.

It’s dramatically vague, but Michael knows who he means. Relaxing now that they’ve gotten past pretenses, he lets the same annoyance that Jon feels flash across his expression. “I don’t know. He’s skipped more than a week by now. I was going to ask _you_.”

“Well, he didn’t tell me anything,” Jon says, returning to his spot on the stepladder.

“If we’re lucky, he’s dropped out,” Michael says. “Good riddance.” He says it with enough heat that Jon almost believes him, but the very fact that he’s here, asking after Gerard like a discarded younger sibling after a gallivanting whelp of an older brother, takes most of the bite out of his words. “I’m going to browse.”

Jon twists around to fix Michael with a stern look. “When you say browse...”

Michael snorts, an oddly delicate sound. “I’ll be orderly.”

“That’s really all I ask of you.”

He disappears behind a row of shelves, and Jon continues his shelving work, sniffing dust out of his nose. He finishes the highest shelf and folds the stepladder, tucking it under his arm as he commandeers the cart. Finds himself thinking about Gerry’s vanishing act. Maybe it’s shingles. Or he’s half-dead in a ditch, mauled by an unearthly beast. All somewhat plausible.

He’s so deep in thought when he pushes the cart around a back shelf that he doesn’t notice the two girls cross-legged on the floor until Sasha yelps a “Woah!” right before the cart makes impact. Jon backs up in a half-panic.

“Sorry!” He pulls the cart aside. Georgie has a familiar neon-tabbed book on her knee, and Sasha has the dazed look of someone who has just narrowly given a car crash the slip.

They survey each other. Jon feels the old friend; that creeping sense of suspicion. “...What are you doing?”

Sasha belatedly stows a small, suspiciously glinting object behind her back like Jon is an aquarium fish that will forget about it once he can’t see it. “Reading,” she says. Then, to reinforce this fact, “we are reading.”

Jon arches a severe eyebrow. “A closed book?” The book on Georgie’s knee is shut, face-up so Jon can see that it is a copy of Lord of the Flies, the standard one that most of the Magnus students get for class.

“We’re reading the title,” Sasha says with laudable bravado. Beside her, Georgie winces. “You know, there’s so many depths when it comes to this one. Like—what does it represent? In the narrative?”

“And you need a lighter to do that?” Jon feels a thousand years old. Jon feels like a warden, or a hideous chimera entrusted with the safekeeping of a lair full of priceless, flammable artifacts. “You know, if that’s not a library book, you have all the right to burn it, but I would beseech you to go outside.”

“Beseech me, baby,” Sasha mumbles at the same time Georgie says, “That’s what I told her.”

“So you are burning it.” Jon recalls a prior conversation, and other books that have not been burned. He thinks he knows what the bookplate on the inner cover is going to say.

“No need for you to be heartbroken about it,” Sasha says. “It’s one book. Not Fahrenheit 451.”

“My heart is perfectly unbroken,” Jon says. “Can I see it first?”

Georgie and Sasha share a look, or several looks, paired with elaborate eyebrow acrobatics. Someone (Jon isn’t sure who) wins the showdown, because the book is ferried to Jon via outstretched hand. What a time for Gerry to drop off the face of the earth.

Jon flips open the inside cover. The two girls watch him, riveted. The bookplate is familiar, a dead ringer for the size, the style, the ink, with one discrepancy: the bottom sprawl of text where the damning name should be has been scribbled out with Sharpie. The impromptu surgery has it reading: _Ex Libris Melanie King_. Jon squints, and through the thick swathes of shadow rendered by the permanent marker, he can see the remains of the _Leit_ in _Leitner_.

Jon turns the book over to examine the blurb, recalls what Gerry said about Michael Crew and the back covers of Leitners, and thinks better of it. He hands it back to Sasha, unread. She lifts her eyebrows as if to say _Not even gonna give it a flip-through?_ He draws his down as if to say _No thanks._

As Sasha and Georgie stand, dusting themselves off, the chime at the front door of the library gives a quiet, metallic susurrus in the distance. Jon wonders if it’s Gerry. Georgie says, “Alright. I guess we’ll be outs—”

“ _Sasha James!_ ”

Every other sound in the library is displaced. The voice that the shout belongs to is unmistakable. Jon feels some primeval fear come alight inside him, like a baby goose hearing the howl of a wild dog. When he turns to Sasha, he sees the exact same terror mirrored in her face, transfigured to ten times the magnitude by the fact that it is her that Melanie is looking for. If this was a sitcom, it would probably be funny. It is not a sitcom. It is not funny.

In the stunned silence of the aftermath the three of them can hear each approaching strike of Melanie’s shoes on the floor. They explode into action, Sasha clutching the book in abject terror, Georgie pushing her to the back door of the library with a _Go! Go! Go!_ and Jon darting out from behind the shelf to anticipate Melanie’s arrival.

She nearly bowls into him. Jon, scared witless, jumps back to avoid getting mauled or bitten or worse. “Melanie! Hi!”

“Where is she?” Melanie is neither impressed nor willing to engage in formalities.

“Who?” Jon squeaks, ever the court jester.

“I will kill you,” Melanie says with utmost surety. “And then I will kill her, except slower.”

“She just left!” Jon swerves his approach. “She’s not here.”

“I didn’t see her leave,” says Melanie, very close to a snarl.

“It was a while ago.”

“You just said she just left!”

“I meant—I didn’t say—I mean—“

Melanie, sick of Jon’s obvious stalling tactics, says, “Get out of my way.” Without waiting for him to heed her order, she sidesteps and slips past him.

Jon follows in a panic. Georgie is standing rigid in front of the back door of the library, hands by her sides like a medieval knight. Jon is reminded of the things that he has in common with her: not going to be a doctor, preference for cats, complete inability to act natural under pressure. He races to join her in front of the door. Two baby gatekeeping gargoyles.

“Let me through,” Melanie says. Jon gulps.

“Why?” Georgie asks. This is better than anything Jon could have come up with.

Melanie doesn’t offer a reason why. “Since when are you two the kings of the library? Fucking Gandalf the Greys?”

Jon, who did not pay attention to much of the Tolkien films, does not get this reference. He hopes Melanie still has qualms against fighting the both of them at once.

“Are we still on for Saturday?” Georgie blurts out. So far out of left field, Melanie balks.

“Yes? Why wouldn’t we be?” Behind Melanie, Michael Crew’s pale face bobs into view. Jon catches his eye and gives him what he hopes is a pleading look. Michael narrows his eyes, glancing from Melanie to the door to Melanie again. Then, the absolute saint, he joins his hands at an angle and mimes flipping through a book, head tilted in obvious question. Jon gives a violent nod.

Georgie says, “I don’t know, I was just wondering. If you might be, um, grounded or something.” Michael makes a hook of J and a flat L with his fingers; Jon nods again to confirm, impatient.

“Oh. I am. Have been since February. I just leave the house. What are they gonna do, ground me again?” As Melanie speaks, Michael conducts one more charade, flicking his thumb to ignite an imaginary lighter, pulsing his hands out in a mock explosion. Jon, genuinely impressed at his capacity for inference, gives one last nod. Michael disappears behind the shelves.

“I would like to trade parents with you,” says Georgie. “Then I could finally get to go to sleepovers.”

Melanie, previous wrath nearly forgotten, nods. “My parents would like you. They always say I need to study with you to absorb the good grades.”

Michael reappears, a blue plastic lighter in one hand and a small canister of lighter fluid in the other, shaking both with slow, blasé motions. He passes Melanie, cool as a cat, and makes his way to the back door. Jon steps inconspicuously away to let him pass, poker-faced.

“Oh, so he can go through?” Melanie is incensed again.

“Anyone can go through,” Georgie says helplessly. (Outside: one Sasha James, standing over a leisurely burning copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, its neon rainbow of tabs melting at a snail’s pace into concrete. The door to the library opens, and Sasha jumps out of her skin, but the person is too short even to be Melanie.

Crew: “What is it?”

“Sorry?”

“Blood? And fighting? I mean the book.”

“Yes, actually, how’d you know?” Sasha would be delighted with another layer to her mystery if she wasn’t so fearful of Melanie on the other side of the door.

“Guessed. It’s a pity, I did that one already. Not my thing.” Michael uncaps the small canister of lighter fluid in his hand and squats beside Sasha to help speed things along.)

Inside, Melanie is done playing games. She steps up and shoulders between Jon and Georgie like Moses through the red sea. For her stature, she is surprisingly strong. Jon has no doubt in his mind that she could put him in the emergency room. But as of now, she’s bent on something else—

She bursts through the door into the open air of the blinding day, Jon and Georgie falling out after her like eavesdropping children in a cartoon. A bicycle lies heat-stricken on the path. The afternoon is alive with the scent of paper burning, or burned, smoke and the thicket of hyacinths on the rise behind the wall that makes the back alley.

Sasha and Michael Crew look up from the last flames of the rapidly disappearing book. One single pink fluorescent book tab lingers beside Michael’s foot. A cloud passes over the sun as if to herald a disaster, and when Melanie starts to cry, none of them know what to do besides Georgie.

**martinb** created group **”library”**

 **martinb** added **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD**

 **martinb** added **Jonathan Sims**

 **martinb** added **sasha 🕯**

 **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD** changed the subject to **”stoker nation 💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼”**

 **martinb** changed the subject to **”library”**

 **sasha 🕯**  
timothy. please behave yourself

 **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD**  
jon u have a PHONE

 **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD**  
???

 **sasha 🕯**  
i swear to god he has used it in front of you before

 **martinb**  
i thought a group chat might help with organising things? if you’re wondering **@Jonathan Sims**

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Fair enough

 **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD**  
fair enough

 **sasha 🕯**  
fair enough

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Who is Sex Machine

 **martinb**  
tim

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Why

 **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD**  
bc i am

 **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD**  
likw an atom bomb

 **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD**  
about to oh iho ihoh oh explode

 **sasha 🕯**  
fair enough.

 **Jonathan Sims**  
And how did you get my number

 **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD**  
don’t! stop me! now !

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Oh right

 **SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD** is typing...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...my chapter outline  
> JON: what on god’s green earth is happening here  
> GEORGIE: go away we’re having boy trouble  
> JON: (wounded) what boy  
> SASHA: (shaking zippo) jurgen leitner
> 
> +  
> rooms full of people Fuck Count: 3  
> elias: 1  
> jon: 1  
> melanie: 1
> 
> we r at 30k (wow! a feat for me) with 3 on the Fuck Count (i think) which makes 0.1f/k, a quite respectable statistic if i do say so myself


	13. Haunted Book

When Jon, half-asleep, bikes to the back door in the hour before sunrise, he nearly topples the potted fig tree outside the library in his trance. He swerves at the last second, throwing himself off his bicycle into a stumble that is thankfully the right side up. Well awake now, he takes a second to breathe, glad that there have been no witnesses to his blunder.

He locks his traitorous bicycle to the fig tree and steps to the door with a little shiver. He drops his hand into the feedback box for the key to the library and finds nothing. This time around, he wants to shout for joy.

The door is unlocked, as he knew it would be, and a light is on in the library that is warm against the early grey morning. Jon forges inside and scans the expanse of wood and dust for the thief of his keys. No one in the chair behind the counter. He brisk-walks through the rows of shelves, peering through books like a big cat looking through the grass for its dinner.

He’s squinting in the wrong direction when he barrels into exactly the person he’s looking for. Jon whips his head around and comes face-to-face with a startled Gerard Keay.

“Wh—Jon?” Gerry’s face is pallid olive, strangely bare and young until Jon realises he’s foregone the usual bruised smudge of under-eye cosmetic. It’s been nearly three weeks since Jon last saw him—stretching from his temple to his forehead are two band-aids arranged parallel to each other like a sad equal sign, too short to completely cover the angry twin gouges that they nurse. The jagged ends of the cuts snake out, red and haphazardly stitched beside his eye. His hair is overgrown with brown roots that are surprisingly lustrous. “Um. Fancy meeting you here.”

Jon remembers to close his mouth. “Where have you _been?_ ”

Gerry says, “Sacramento.” And then flattens his mouth shut like he can’t believe he’s revealed his hand just like that. 

“ _What?_ Sacramento?” Jon whisper-shouts. “You were in the States?”

“Yes, Sacramento,” Gerry repeats, beleaguered. “Well, mostly Sacramento. We were in Washington, D.C. for a bit after. And L.A. before that because my mum had to pick up a book. It took half a day. I met zero celebrities.”

“Looks like you met something other than a celebrity,” Jon says, glancing warily at Gerry’s forehead. “You fall into the tiger enclosure at Sacramento Zoo?”

Gerry laughs without humour. “There is no tiger enclosure at Sacramento Zoo.”

“You went?” Jon is seized by the sudden and terrible longing to visit a zoo, like he’s been deconstructed and secretly replaced by the six-year-old him that never got to go to the zoo.

“No,” says Gerry. “Listen, have you seen the blond Michael? Shelley. I have questions for him.”

Jon would like to say that he has questions galore for Gerry, but refrains. “Not today. I doubt he’s even in school this early in the morning.”

Gerry laughs again, this time a manic little giggle. “Of course he’s in school. Where else can he go?” 

With that, he drops the library key ring in Jon’s palm, tucks his hands into the pockets of his age-soft leather jacket, and makes for the front door. Jon watches the undone laces of his school shoes trail behind him, flailing with each step, and crosses his fingers internally, but Gerry, adept at insouciance, does not trip. 

The windchime moves as the door swings shut. Some reunion.

Jon’s second close encounter bulldozes into the library in the afternoon of the same day, wearing a Magnus windbreaker and a scowl for the books (figuratively—hell, likely literally too). He looks up from his half-done homework and sees his entire short life flash before his eyes, all fifteen years of it. But Melanie is already halfway to his counter, and she’s seen him, so diving underneath it and staying there until his teeth stop chattering is out of the question.

She reaches. Once she’s before the counter, she leans forward over it à la crime flick interrogator. “Sims,” is her opener.

If this is her ploy to get Jon to call her King and stoke her self-esteem with a much-needed royal flush, it doesn’t manifest. “Me-lanie?” Jon’s voice spikes in between the first and second syllable in tentative fear.

Melanie sighs. It’s a barbed sound, somehow. “You don’t have to piss your pants at me. The leaf I’ve turned over is so new that I photosynthesise twice as efficiently now.”

Jon tries to take her word for it. “Did you practice that line on your way in?”

She curls her lip. “Maybe.” She moves to circle past the counter and to Jon’s astonishment drops into the empty chair beside him. “Look.”

“Yes?” Jon tries to swivel discreetly away to put some distance between them. “I’m looking.”

“You are such a smartass. Look,” she repeats. “You’re the librarian,” she lowers her voice mockingly, “the keeper of the tomes.”

“Yes?” Jon says again, waiting for the catch.

“So tell me who Jurgen Leitner is.” At the look on Jon’s face, Melanie grins like a smug cat. “Your boyfriend?”

After the initial shock has fallen away, Jon has the presence of mind to be repulsed. “He is a morally decrepit man responsible for crimes beyond what we can fathom.”

“Not a no.”

“ _No_ ,” hisses Jon. “He is not my boyfriend.”

She laughs once, then sighs, the kick of her own gag evidently having worn off, and leans back in her chair. The two of them are uneasily silent. Melanie crosses her arms in thinly-veiled self-placation. “I think he ruined my life,” she muses.

Jon, in distress at this admission, says, “For a while I thought he ruined mine.”

Melanie sits up. “Did you have one?”

Misconstruing this, Jon says, “Yes, I had a life, thank you for being rude for no reason.”

“Did you have a _book_ ,” Melanie clarifies. “How thick is your skull?”

“Oh. Yes. Years ago,” Jon says, abashed. “I’ve seen a couple more since, though, my, um, my friend is big with the books.” His friend? What the hell? Are they?

“What was it? Are they all the same way?” Melanie is back in grilling mode. Her smile is wicked when it reappears. “Jonathan Sims, did you have a delinquent phase too?”

Jon winces. “They’re all different. My first was one with a spider. I was eight, I did not have a delinquent phase, no.”

Melanie sniffs. “Baby’s first haunted book.”

“You can’t possibly believe they’re _haunted_ ,” says Jon.

“Can’t I?” Melanie snipes. “You like your supernatural books with some semblance of credibility? Is that it?”

“Just listen to what you’re saying. Haunted. Book. Ridiculous.”

“Haunted bleeding book,” Melanie says. “I’ll say it again and again.”

“Do not.”

“Haunted. Book. Haunted. Book.”

“Yes, al _right_ ,” says Jon, aggravated. “You want a haunted book? I’ll show you one.” He stands and crosses to the shelf connected to the counter, where an assortment of books is crowded into the lowest level. Jon pulls out a palmful of them by their spines. A couple of embossed title alphabets flake off golden on his fingertips. Tucked behind the surface books is Gerard’s bone Leitner, cover pressed flush against the back of the shelf.

When he slaps the leather-bound volume in front of Melanie, she says, “Now this is what a haunted book should look like.”

“Some people have the decency not to put sticky tabs on their Leitners.” He flips the calfskin cover up to flash the bookplate at her.

She leans over it, opaque curtain of black hair sliding down to hide her face. “Some people have to study their Leitners for Lit class.”

“I don’t think your Lord of the Flies was the Lord of the Flies that they were trying to teach you,” Jon says. “Not that I read yours. Not trying to have a delinquent phase in my future.”

“What does this one do?” Melanie asks, impatient. She reaches out to flip through the first few pages. Obviously dismayed, she says, “I can’t read this.”

“I can’t either,” Jon says. “Can you stand over there? Under the skylight.”

“Why?” Melanie, loath to do Jon’s bidding, stays seated.

“Just do it. I’m trying to show you how it works.”

She stands haughtily and rounds the counter to the open area before the shelves start, and Jon frowns as he realises his own miscalculation. Melanie is bathed entirely in sunlight, squinting balefully back at Jon, her shadow faint as a wisp. “Sorry. Not there. Come back, by here should be fine.”

“I despise you,” she says, but complies. Next to the counter the shadow she casts is more substantial, though scattered by natural light and the lamp over the countertop.

Jon tries. He runs the book through the shade the way he remembers Gerry doing, then gives it a thorough shake. Two minuscule bones drop to the floor below.

“What is that?” Melanie crouches to pick up the harvest. “Oh, what the hell. Was this a mouse?”

“I don’t know,” says Jon. He blinks. “There were more bones the last time.” He gives it another shot, keeping it for longer in Melanie’s shadow, and produces three more very small bits of skeleton. He pauses. “I think maybe it doesn’t work so well in the middle of the day.”

“Your book is nocturnal?” Melanie is incredulous. She rolls a mystery part of anatomy between her thumb and forefinger, the bone thin as paper at some spots, like it’s been pressed flat between pages or something else.

“It needs a good shadow,” Jon explains. “I think.”

“What’s wrong with mine?”

“Nothing. It’s just too weak.”

Melanie says, “Yours is weaker.”

“It’s not a competition.”

“Whatever,” she says, and gathers the very few bones that Jon has mustered. “So this book makes bones. Big deal.”

“If it did something other than make bones, I would have burned it long ago,” Jon says grimly.

“No!” Melanie cries in mock astonishment. “You! Burning books!”

“Yes, me, burning books, because otherwise,” he says. “They would burn me back. Or kill me dead. And eat my corpse. Wear me as a human suit. I don’t know.”

She regards him with a vindictive eye. “Don’t do that.”

Jon returns the eye as best as he can. “Do what?”

She makes a twisting sound of frustration and some long-sitting feeling. “Try to...try to hint at me that what Sasha did was for my own good. I don’t want to hear it. _Yes_ ,” she says hotly, cutting Jon off where his protest had barely formed in his head, “I know. I know, okay? I know I was horrible with it. I know it made me the monster. I don’t need you to tell me that that book was evil and hurt me.”

Jon, never skilled at navigating his feelings or other people’s, stays silent. She continues. “I slept with that book underneath my pillow for months. I dropped it in the rain once, and it felt like watching someone...crush my heart into a ditch.” She pauses, a wounded recess. “But of course it was perfect the next day. No water-damaged pages. Good as new.”

She falls back into silence, done with her words. Jon says, “You know, it was all of us. It wasn’t just Sasha. It’s not her fault. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t do that either,” Melanie orders. She’s incensed, her face scrunched in anger. “Ugh! God! You broke my heart and you saved me and you want to apologise! To me! I _hate_ you,” she says with feeling. “Do not forget that.”

Jon, something inside him going upsettingly soft, says, “I won’t. Pinky promise.”

She looks up at him, still tetchy, and extends her pinky. They hook together in a bizarre pact.

“My book ate someone I knew,” Jon tells her over their linked fingers. “And I just let it.”

“You were eight,” she says, frowning still. “What were you supposed to do? Feed yourself to it instead?”

“Yes?” he hazards. “I picked that Leitner up. It was my cross to bear.”

“You’re so dramatic,” says Melanie. In direct hypocrisy of her accusation, she turns her face to the blinding rectangle of the skylight, and says, “I’m going to kill Jurgen Leitner.” Above, a bird goes shrieking past in unconditional, surreal solidarity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello hope you are having fun! chapter 13! (whew!) if you’d like to you can find me on tumblr @bdhead for art mostly #selfplug


	14. Library Against Library

“I’m going to kill Jurgen Leitner,” says Gerard Keay. He’s belly-down on a back couch, ankles crossed in the air, chin propped on the platform of his forearms.

Jon startles, his hand stilling on the spines of the array in a shelf, and looks back over his shoulder at Gerry. One brown eye floats open indolently. Gerry appraises Jon from underneath two twenty-stitch gouges, then closes his eye again. “What?”

“It’s just that it’s the second time I’m hearing that this week,” Jon says. He turns back to the books. “Which is odd. Considering how specific it is.”

“Have you been talking to Crew? He’s been stealing my personality. That’s probably why.” Gerry’s feet lever up and down in the air as he talks.

“What personality?” Jon says lightly to the shelf. Gerry makes an affronted scoff from behind him. “And no. It was somebody else.”

This seems to get Gerry’s attention. Jon can hear him fidgeting on the couch. Jon says, “Please don’t put your shoes on the sofa.”

“You can’t even see me.”

“I have eyes on the back of my head.”

“What are you, a kindergarten teacher or something?” Another flop. Jon chooses to believe that this is Gerry humouring him. “Who was it? That wants to kill Leitner too?” He hesitates, then hazards a guess. “The big curly one?”

Jon, so bewildered that he has to look back at Gerry to check if he’s joking, says, “What? Martin? No?”

“Aw.”

“I would say of every human person I know Martin would be the least inclined to kill Jurgen Leitner.”

“See, that’s why. I like to expect the unexpected. If I’m right, I win, but if I’m wrong, that means it was what was expected, not the unexpected, so I win anyway.” Gerry traces a swirl in the fabric of the armrest with his pointer, eyes still closed. “But come on. Tell me who it was.”

“It was Melanie,” Jon reveals. “The delinquent? If you remember.”

“Oh,” Gerry says. “Okay. That’s expected. Why?”

“She ran into one of his books and it didn’t go well. Why else?” Jon puts a book he’s lost interest in back into the shelf and goes to boost himself up onto the armrest of the couch. Gerry rolls over onto his back and opens his eyes to stare straight up at the ceiling. “We burned it. If you wanted to snatch it up and pawn it off, it’s too late.”

Now Gerry’s eyes flick to Jon, looking upward, unreadable. His hair is splayed out behind his head like a spiky halo or small flattened crow. After a long time he looks away and sighs so quietly that Jon almost doesn’t catch it. “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

Jon, disarmed in the face of this new, reticent Gerry, doesn’t know what to say. He feels like a man crossing the capricious grasslands of a salt marsh, or maybe a veterinarian performing surgery on a very small animal. To be fair, he feels this way in most social situations, so it’s not too out of his ability. “Okay,” he manages, which is just perfect. Absolutely swell.

“It’s the truth,” Gerry snaps, but there’s no heat in it. Jon twists to look at him, and Gerry closes his eyes like he’s not interested in a face-off. “I know you think I don’t have morals about these books,” he says, and Jon waits for a _but_ that doesn’t come. “Maybe I don’t.”

“So why do you want to kill Jurgen Leitner?” Jon asks. A safe question. The equivalent of a successful mouse kidney transplant.

“I just think it would be fitting.” One of Gerry’s hands hovers up, threatening to pick at his stitches, but Jon slaps it down before it starts. “You know, my mum used to do business with him before I was born. She talks about him like a school pal. It’s horrendous.”

“Is he even still alive?” Jon has always thought of Leitner as some far-off bogeyman, slinking through the shadows of history. Maybe sporting a tasteful mustache the colour of a witch’s cat. Attending high society cocktail parties, all angles in fine silk suits that have been washed diligently to expunge the smell of blood. To even imagine him walking around and doing things like living in a house and getting his gas filled is beyond Jon.

“Oh, yes,” Gerry answers, promptly sending Jon’s entire perception of Jurgen Leitner crashing down around his ears. “And living in London, or so I’ve heard.”

“Who are you hearing these kinds of things from?” Jon asks crossly. His picture of Leitner in his head requires the man to be dead, murdered in some glamorous manner by a victim hell-bent on revenge. He doesn’t enjoy the thought that the hell-bent victims might be people he knows.

Gerry smoothes a crisp lock of black hair away from his forehead wounds. Jon is soothed by the knowledge that whatever ghastly chemicals in Gerry’s hair dye will not have the opportunity to acquaint itself with the inside of Gerry’s head. “Book folk. One American client had gossip.” He smiles coldly to himself. “Jurgen Leitner. In our very city, rebuilding his collection. I even had her write down his contact information on a napkin, I have it in my room. I already sent some scam emails.”

If the thought of Jurgen Leitner alive had vexed Jon, the mental image of Jurgen Leitner receiving scam emails is too much for him to bear. Jon thinks to himself, _jurgenleitner@gmail.com_ , and shudders. “That’s horrible.”

“Okay, NCSC.”

“Not your scam emails. It’s horrible that he’s still out there collecting those books.”

“Oh.” Gerry pauses before he breaks the worse news. “And he’s commissioning new ones. So they say. But don’t worry your pretty head about it. I’m going to kill him, remember?”

Jon tries not to think about the years of acute arachnophobia that followed his first encounter. His brain works like a hateful steam machine. “Surely people other than you have tried.”

“That’s what I don’t get,” Gerry admits. “The whole traumatised world should be out for his blood. He should be swimming in a bathtub full of his internal organs by now.” (This proposed death could keep pace with any one of Jon’s imagined glamorous murders.) “His tires should be slashed. His flat burned to the ground. His kneecaps shattered, Kerrigan style.”

By now, Jon has realised that he’s meant to be Watson in this situation, and prompts, accommodatingly, “So why isn’t he?”

Gerry, a piss-poor Sherlock, says, “I don’t know.” He shimmies himself up on the couch to rest his head on Jon’s back. “But I’ll find out. And then I’ll kill him.”

“Sounds a lot like cutting off your family’s source of revenue. Get your shoes off the sofa.”

“You do have eyes on the back of your head.” Gerry’s head rises away as he curls to shuck his shoes off, then drops back after he’s deposited his shoes on the floor by the couch. He skillfully avoids Jon’s first observation.

“And you’ve got competition,” Jon adds. Between Gerry and Melanie, the odds seem fifty-fifty. Gerry is craftier, Melanie more vicious. Jon can picture Gerry slicing a rope to drop a grand piano on the man, and Melanie mauling Leitner out of the way at the last moment to tear his face to shreds.

“Ask her to join me,” says Gerry, changing the game. “We can start a club.”

Or they could do that.

Jon scans the mess decorating the library counter and doesn’t find anything appropriate. He looks up, wrinkles his nose at the ridiculous whiteboard that Gerry wheeled in before they began their conference, dense with suggestions in blue and green ink, and turns to the shelf. Three faces watch him expectantly.

“I spy,” he starts, “something that begins with the letter E.”

From the top of a stack of chairs, Michael Crew says, “You can’t do that.” Today he’s foregone the neck brace for a chunky knitted scarf.

Jon, already disgruntled from being strong-armed into a child’s game, says, “What.”

“Say the whole thing,” jeers Melanie. She has her arms folded where she’s slouched halfway down into a swivel chair. The four of them make a compelling symposium, perched on an array of tables and chairs, all at different elevations, like a cleverly-blocked play.

“No,” Jon says, obstinate.

The expert at issuing ultimatums, Gerry says, “Say the whole thing or we’ll have to stop playing.”

Jon removes his spectacles to knead away the headache that is gradually precipitating. “We can skip my turn.”

“No, we can’t,” Michael objects. “It’s three more words. You’ll live.”

“I spy,” Jon snaps, admitting defeat and unhappy about it, “ _with my little eye._ Something that begins with E.” Somewhere in between he does a mental stack-up and discovers that it is not in fact three more words.

There’s a satisfied, pensive pause as his three guessers look around. Michael looks very pointedly to Gerry and asks, “Is it ethnically ambiguous?”

Gerry, looking back at Michael, says, “Is it egomaniac?”

Melanie, who is more interested in winning than using I Spy to squabble, asks, “Is it _evil book_?”

“No to all of those.”

“Is it encyclopaedia?” Melanie tries again, sharp as anything.

“It was encyclopaedia.”

Picking up the whiteboard marker, Gerry marks a fourth strike under Melanie’s name. “Melanie wins. We should get back to work.”

“We should do another round,” says Michael, who is at three points.

“That was the eighth round. We have to go around again if we start one more.”

“Sore loser.” Michael flicks a glance at the dearth of any ink strokes underneath KEAY, then to his own passable CREW. The two of them have been at odds with each other all afternoon. As far as Jon can tell.

“I’m being focused.”

Melanie says, “Let’s get back on track.” Jon can’t be sure if she’s unwilling to compromise her victory, or eager to resume planning justice against her nemesis. Either way, Michael, outvoted, sighs and hops off his chair stack. The rest of them converge again, pulling in chairs and checking around for eavesdroppers (none).

Picking up where they left off, Gerry says, “Main goal should be to put a stop to his dealings. By any means necessary.” Which Jon translates to mean, _I’ll kill that old sod if I have to._

“I still think we should just kill the bastard. There are four of us and one of him,” Melanie says it in clearer terms, presenting her case as rationally as she would a powerpoint.

“There are also thousands of police officers in London. And only so many decent young offender institutions,” Michael says. “Not that I would want to be in a decent young offender institution, even.”

“And you’re assuming the four of us are enough to kill him. He’s lived this long.” Jon squints at Gerry’s fine looping script on the whiteboard. Green marker has indicated— _JURGS: Can hold his own? Maybe has hired protection?_ Under, a footnote— _Rich as all hell. Possible._ “If he has bodyguards, wouldn’t attempts be all over the news? Headlines like, Local man apprehended; suspect tried to kill Scandinavian millionaire.”

“Same if he can fight good. Except the headlines would be a little more interesting.” Gerry has his thumb at the very end of one of his forehead cuts, but wilts under the pressure of both Michael and Jon’s disapproving gazes and sets it down in his lap guiltily. “Local man and Scandinavian millionaire fight to death; Scandinavian millionaire prevails.” He makes the whiteboard marker dance up between his fingers. “Scandinavian millionaire surprisingly adept at swordfighting. We interviewed him for five tips about correcting your stance...”

“If we can’t fight him we should hack his bank account. He can’t buy anything if he’s broke.” This is from Michael, who has been big on hacking bank accounts since the start of their afternoon rendezvous. “We can donate his money to M.A. and get plaques with our names on them in the foyer.”

“We already told you, nobody is hacking any bank accounts. Mainly because none of us know how,” Gerry says, putting down the idea swiftly and soundly again. “And I don’t want a Magnus plaque. I have self respect.”

“Then we have to find a way around his guard. Which is going to be stupid hard because none of us know what it is either.”

Jon squints harder, like he could get to the bottom of everything just by doing so. Michael, resigned, takes the duster and wipes the I Spy point record away, glancing the side of one of Gerry’s many curving arrows. It’s a complex web of theories they’re weaving. Looking at _Lure: offer him the haunted books we have? Doesn’t have to be the truth_ , the answer alights cheerfully in Jon’s brain.

“He’s Jurgen Leitner,” he slides a look to Gerry first; surely he’s realised at the same time as Jon. It’s not a genius conclusion. Gerry looks evenly back.

Gerry says, obligingly, “He is.”

“So he has a book. And it can do things like swordfight his enemies for him. Except,” Jon says, amending his theory for sensibility as he goes along, “not swordfight. Something more benevolent? Change their minds, maybe.”

“That tracks.” Michael, picking up the other marker, fills the newly empty space left by their I Spy points with _Protection: book_. “Explains the lack of articles.”

“We’ll get that book, then,” Melanie says. “And destroy it.”

“But it’s just conjecture,” says Jon. “We can’t be sure that’s the reason.”

“No need to put your own deductions down like that,” Gerry tells him. “We know that he’s definitely got a target on his back.” (Whiteboard, in Gerry’s green: _has basically doxxed himself via bookplate_.) “And that he has successfully guarded against threats, and he has done so discreetly. A book’s a reasonable guess for how. Actually, kind of the best guess. I would bet money.”

Jon, oddly warmed by this, makes a vague sound. Melanie, determined to get to what’s most important, says, “We would basically kill him if we removed his protection. Whether it’s a book or not. Like pulling the wings off a moth.” Gerry turns to her, and the two of them share brief, wicked grins.

“It’s a plan. Jon, you can write him a smart little email. Talk about how we have part of his displaced collection, and we are oh so committed to helping him rebuild,” Gerry suggests, devious. “You can do the On Behalf of the Library Club thing that you do. He’ll love that.”

“How soon are we going to do this?” Jon is seized by a sudden panic. In a very short amount of time he will have fully grasped how horrible an idea it is.

“We can do tomorrow,” Melanie suggests, keen to rid the world of a blight.

“I can’t do tomorrow.” Gerry tugs a lock of fringe down his face. “I’m booked.”

“Why?” Michael asks innocently as he loads his goading gun, not for the first time today. “Are you going to Hot Topic with Oliver Banks?”

Gerry’s mouth flattens into a sour line that says Michael’s guess is upsettingly close. “There is no Hot Topic in this country, and you know that. He wants to see that movie about the secret agents.” He turns to set the green marker down in the ledge of the whiteboard, and to his back, his theory more or less confirmed, Michael sing-songs _Gerryyyyy._ Then, in a higher-pitched warble clearly meant to be Gerard, _Ollieeeee._

“Do you actually call him that?” Melanie wonders, amused. Gerry makes a face like a pitcher of bad lemonade. The pink in his face is enough for Jon to infer a guilty yes.

“You,” Gerry says to Michael in response, the word like a perfectly-fletched arrow. “Are the inferior Michael. Mike Lite. You’re the Michael that people get in their Happy Meal and say, _Aw man_.”

“Okay. Who’s Mike Prime?” Michael Crew probes. He sounds unhurt by the consequences of his own provocation. Melanie’s eyes are rolling between the two of them, like their altercation is a tennis match that she has a large bet riding on.

“Salesa. You are at the very bottom of the ladder. Even the old Michael is better than you.”

“I understand Salesa. Below Michael Shelley? That’s hurtful.”

“Lay off him. He’s basically my stepdad.” To support this frankly bizarre claim, Gerry says, “He knew my father when he was in school.”

(In fact, Shelley had not appreciated his choice of verb when Gerry had come knocking for answers. “Did I know Eric Delano? Did I _know_ Eric Delano? _Know_ is immaterial. I didn’t just know your father. I breathed your father. I wrote him letters. I made him a _mixtape!_ Well, I burned him a CD. It’s the same thing.” Gerry had told him, considering Shelley’s perceived lack of hinge and Eric Delano’s romantic history, that Shelley seemed like his father’s type. To which Shelley had replied, sadly, “I wasn’t always this mad.” Clearly they had not worked out. Clearly Shelley was not over it and still had a lot of wailing about being left behind to do.)

“Creepy,” Michael Crew comments. “Don’t remind me that he’s actually super old.” Then, swerving back on topic, “We should draft that email. It’s got to be good if we want to get Leitner here and muggable.”

“What are we going to do after we get the book?” Jon asks. “Just let him go? And have him report us to the police for robbing him?”

“Assuming it’s a book, we can use it,” Melanie reasons. “Whatever protection he has, we can borrow.” To Jon’s dismay, every facet of their plan is smoothing into place.

“If it’s not a book?” Jon says, determined to play devil’s advocate to his own theory.

Gerry and Michael share a look that Jon can’t parse. Gerry shrugs and looks away. “Then we go to the same YOI, I suppose, for the greater good, and live at Her Majesty’s mercy.”

To: jleitner02@gmail.com  
From: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: The Leitner Library

Dear Mr Leitner,

We at the Magnus Academy library have heard from reliable sources that you are interested in locating volumes of your scattered collection. Considering the Herculean nature of this task, we empathise and wish to do our best to assist.

Currently, we are in possession of several books of your library, and would be delighted to relinquish them to your care. If you would like to collect them, we are located in Chelsea, London, very near the Thames Embankment. We are free to meet any time on weekdays after 7pm. A map of the campus has been attached to facilitate your way to our library, should you accept.

Thank you for your cooperation. We look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely,  
Jonathan Sims  
On Behalf of the Library Club

**g 👁**  
you should major in writing emails.

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Tks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> buckle up! we’re in bad decision town!


	15. Canis Medius

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ......before we enter bad decision town,

Mortifyingly, Martin is too preoccupied with the dog to notice him at first.

Today’s is substantially larger than the library job. It’s a stately, point-eared type of large breed, the colour of muddy water. For anybody other than Martin, it would be a handful, but the dog has met its match in dog walkers today. This doesn’t mean that it’s deterred from trying to cause trouble.

He’s wrangling the mutt at a crossing on Saturday morning when someone on a bicycle zips to a stop by him. At the very edge of his vision they sling themselves off their bike in one clean move. The dog attached to Martin snaps at a stranger and is pulled back hastily.

“Sorry! Sorry, sorry,” Martin says as he reels the mutt in. To the dog, “You’re incorrigible.”

On his other side, someone says, “Martin?”

Martin, caught, jerks his head up. It’s his own personal Voynich Manuscript. Jon’s hair is wet like he’s fresh from a shower, licked points standing up straight in all directions. The shirt he’s wearing looks soft and too big for him. Jon twists his hand absentmindedly on his bike handle like he’s revving the engine of a motorcycle and Martin closes his mouth one second too late. “Jon?”

“It is you,” says Jon. Then, after a brief, awkward pause: “You live near?”

“Oh, um, yes,” Martin replies. Is Jon making...small talk? “Yeah. Do you?”

“Sort of. I’m going to the store.” There’s a large, crackly IKEA bag slung over his back, empty yet. “Is that your dog?” Jon has made a valiant effort not to let any disdain creep into his voice, and Martin appreciates it.

“No, I’m just walking her,” Martin says. The dog tries stealthily to get a sniff of Jon’s ankles. Another horrifying detail: Jon has ankles, which are inevitably connected to calves well-made from non-stop pedaling. Jon has legs and Jon is wearing a pair of bike shorts underneath the oversized shirt. Martin does not want to be thinking about this. (He will be thinking about this for the next five hours.)

“Do you get paid?” Jon seems to be conducting a friendly interrogation. He extends a fearful hand for the dog to investigate instead, which it does in earnest with loud snuffing noises.

“Oh, yes,” Martin says. His mind is racing for more questions to ask Jon in return and coming up empty. It seems ridiculous, that they’ve gone from saving each others’ lives during the week to small talk at junctions on weekends. “You’re not permanently turned off dogs now, are you?”

Jon, remembering the dog creature, wrinkles his nose. “Was always a cat person. Well,” he says as the man turns to green. He makes to get back on his bicycle.

“Woah, hey,” Martin says, alarmed. “Don’t ride through crossings if you haven’t got a helmet.” He realises how he sounds by the end of the reproach and falls sheepishly silent.

Jon, as sheepish as Martin feels, stops halfway. “Oh. Fair enough.” They start to cross together, the other side of pavement suddenly dizzyingly far. The dog bumps up against Jon’s side lovingly. “I’d wear a helmet usually. I just washed my hair though.”

“Imagine you get run over. They’ll put that in the newspaper as a quote.”

Jon smiles, then clears his throat into his fist. “Victim is reported to have said that he would have worn a helmet, but he just washed his hair though.”

Martin laughs. “Am I the one reporting?”

“My eyewitness.”

As they cross, a memory pings in Martin’s head. “Hey, by the way, I think Tim was wondering if you were free on Tuesday. And, um, if you wanted to come see him play rugby. It’s the final.” In fact, Tim had heard about Sasha and Jon’s talent show outing and been despondent. (“You asked him?” Sasha: “Both of you weren’t free.” “And he said _yes?_ ”)

“Tuesday? What time?” Jon looks over; Martin does his best to keep looking back.

“Just after school. If you come by our class then we can go together.”

“I don’t have anything else to do.” Jon flicks his thumb on the bell of his bike, looking down.

Martin is in a minor shock. “You’ll come?”

“I will.” They’re almost to the end of the crossing. It might as well be the end of organised society as far as Martin is concerned.

“Tim will be chuffed.” Tim, in a way, is just as confounding as Jon, swapping between bouts of both petty hatred and puppy-dog infatuation like a springy door stopper. (“Autocrat. Numpty. _Prat_ ,” while rearranging Jon’s scorned spreadsheets. But also, last Friday, “I wish he would come to my games.”)

“Do you think,” Jon starts, “He’ll be stoked?”

If Jon’s dry humour was a shock to Martin’s system, his wordplay is a chair to the back of the head. Martin’s mouth drops slightly agape. “Jon.”

“Martin,” says Jon, dragging the first syllable just the slightest. “See you Monday.”

“And Tuesday,” Martin says dumbly. “See you.” Jon, wheeling ahead, gives him one last look, swift and playful and a little bit embarrassed as he mounts his bike. The pavement ahead is wide and washed white, rough for anybody on two wheels, but Jon lifts himself effortlessly off the seat to balance on his pedals as he rides over a crack in the concrete. His left leg a straight crutch, his calves like carpenter’s carvings. He’s gone like a breeze with a scent on it. The dog at Martin’s feet whines.

Martin only realises he’s stopped walking to watch him go when the tiny brush stroke of his shape in the distance has disappeared. Martin’s own route curves right. Away. _Lord_ , he thinks without knowing what he’s asking for. He wants to say please; he wants to say he’s sorry. But instead he prays, inaccurately but not insincerely: _I’ve been good my whole life._

Tuesday afternoon post-school Jon packs his things into his schoolbag and wanders the hall outside his own class until he hears a familiar voice shouting seemingly random celebrity names. The barrage pauses after another person says, “No, she’s blonde—I said actress!” and the guesser hits back with, “Taylor Swift is an actress!” “She is not.”

When Jon peeks into the class he’s treated to the frankly bizarre sight of Martin with a phone held to his head, rattling off more blonde actresses as Sasha rejects each one. He stays by the door, dithering to watch them for a second. Sasha is perched on a desk, her legs swinging impatiently. Martin is leaning against another. He sees Jon at the door and stops guessing blonde actresses. Sasha heaves a sigh; the screen of the phone at Martin’s forehead has gone red to tell him that his time is up.

“Jon! Hi!” Martin passes the phone back to Sasha, his poor shot at what must be a kind of charades forgotten. To Sasha: “Who was it?”

“Reese Witherspoon.”

“Oh, that’s easy. Damn it.”

“I think my clues were bad. I don’t know any of the movies she’s been in.”

Martin’s mouth drops open in that particular way he has. “Hello? _Legally Blonde?_ ”

“She was in Legally Blonde?”

“Yes, she was in Legally Blonde. Okay. Are we ready to go?”

The three of them make their way to the pitch as one jostling entity. Jon, personally, has never seen a game of rugby and has no clue how it works other than that there’s a great deal of tackling involved. Martin and Sasha don’t seem to be much better. As they walk, Sasha tilts the screen of her phone toward them to let them read the section of the wikipedia on game rules.

“So they have to score points,” Jon paraphrases. “I understand this.”

“And they do that by getting the ball in the goal area,” Sasha adds.

“Where’s that?” Martin cranes his neck to look closer. “Between the goal line and...the...”

“I think it’ll make more sense when we’re there.” They take a flight of stairs down, spiraling to the ground floor. Martin, too absorbed in the cryptic paragraphs of rugby union rules, trips on the last step. Jon catches his arm at the last second.

Outside, the sun is up and shining, for once. As always, the sheer hedonism of the rugby field astonishes Jon, lush and emerald and indulgently huge. The bleachers are crowded with the early rush of students already. Someone has brought in popcorn; Jon can tell because hundreds of perfectly-popped, fluffy kernels go flying in a spray with a shriek as the bringer of the popcorn is startled. By the side, a boy in a dark-green Magnus jersey is being fed grapes by his mother. Jon has to squint; it isn’t Tim.

They weave their way through the scattered sea of people and find an empty spot high on the stands. Sasha points out the in-goal area. On each side of the pitch is a sterile white structure of two poles, like the pins on a flat plug waiting for a socket, or like an unnecessary surplus of lightning rods. Jon is no athlete, but he can surmise that a ball ought to go between these.

Martin says something, but a cheer from a group near them renders him inaudible. “What?” Jon says.

“Tim’s number fourteen,” Martin leans to say near Jon’s ear. “He’s a winger? Or something. He does a lot of the running.”

The players are starting to stream onto the pitch, M.A. Owls in the school’s forest green, the other team in classy stripes. Sasha, with the best eyesight of the three, points Tim out among the rest of the team. “Over there. Talking to number six.” Tim ducks out of the way of his teammate’s playful cuff, and Jon sees his face as the blur of a grin. One of these days Jon will get new glasses. Not anytime soon, though.

After a very civil coin toss and exchange of pleasantries the game begins and any effort that Jon has made to understand the mechanics of the sport evaporates. Their school has won the coin toss, that much he understands. A player in green kicks the ball and everything descends into chaos. All around Jon, people are shouting, Sasha included.

It soon becomes clear to Jon that rugby, at its heart, is intrinsically funny. It’s brutal enough to make his teeth hurt in his skull the way they would if he was the one on the field having it bounced around in his head. It’s seamlessly beautiful at the line-out when someone is lifted to catch the ball, hoisted by his teammates with faith enough for one fateful second of air-time, hands steady to intercept the prize and drop back down. But beyond everything, rugby is concentrated comedy.

He finally picks Tim out from among the disarray of players and is just in time to see the opponent beside get tackled extravagantly by a Magnus forward. Tim joins the tackle. The whole bundle of rugby boys goes a-rolling. The ball pops out; so does Tim, springing unhandily to his feet and tripping over to grab hold of it. No dice. He’s tackled back onto the grass at the speed of light. Jon, unravelled, has to duck his head.

“Jon—are you _laughing?_ ” Martin is incredulous.

Jon sucks in a deep breath and wills his shoulders to stop shaking. He lifts his head again. “No-o.” he coughs guiltily.

Martin, unconvinced, turns back to the game, looking very concerned. Jon isn’t sure if it’s for Tim’s safety or Jon’s own sanity.

“What are they _doing?_ ” Jon demands a little while later, in perfect awe. This cannot be a real sport.

Sasha says, “It’s called a scrum.”

Jon says, “That is exactly what it should be called.”

At half-time, both teams are neck-to-neck, Magnus only two points ahead. Jon has discerned that, yes, the white poles are for scoring goals of a sort, a process which involves stupendous feats of leg strength. Gameplay mainly consists of running with the ball to the goal zones. And tackling. More than once, players have failed to execute tackles and succeeded instead in sliding record distances across the grass, sending Jon into hysterics each time. As he lies back on the bleachers, crumpled and trembling with silent laughter, he is dimly aware that this is the hardest he has laughed in a very long time. Maybe he’s making up for years of lost laughter with this one circus of a rugby game. Sasha and Martin have been at a loss since his second outburst of giggles.

“This is the secret to your sense of humour?” Sasha asks him once the tears on his cheeks have dried. “Rugby? Really?”

Jon, only marginally embarrassed, says, “Search me.” He hiccups once, breathing deep to replenish the oxygen he lost while laughing. “I’m done. You said you wanted to get a snack before they start again?” He strains to sit up—Martin is looking at him like he’s mutated and grown two extra heads.

They pick through the rows of spectators together. At the vending machines Sasha and Martin spot somebody who looks like a photocopy of Tim and converge on him like excited scavenger birds (“Danny!” “Daniel!” “Danny-boy!”) From the way they fuss over him, Jon can assume he’s Tim’s younger brother. Jon hangs back and swaps disinterested glances with Danny’s friends, who are also hanging back.

Sasha ushers him forward. “Jon, this is Danny Stoker,” she introduces, “Danny, Jon.”

“I’ve heard about you,” says Danny. This, Jon knows, is absolutely damning.

“Oh, uh, great,” Jon says, his heart rate going ballistic.

“Tim says he wants your eyebrows,” Danny reports. “He’s going to steal them in the middle of the night.”

“I—”

“Bye, Martin. Bye, Sash.” Danny jogs after his friends, leaving Jon to marinate in this revelation.

When the three of them return to the bleachers with their snacks, half-time is already over, and the crowd roars as some unfortunate soul skids the ball out of bounds. The game proceeds in fits of line-outs and penalty kicks and more slapstick violence. Someone spits a tooth into the grass; a Magnus player gets sent off. Martin looks stressed beyond words. “This cannot be safe.”

“I believe that’s the point,” Sasha says.

Jon, with his hand over his mouth to hide the fact that he’s still grinning from when the rival fly-half tripped over someone else’s leg and bounced so magnificently it should have been accompanied with a _boing!_ , says, “At least we’re winning.”

The clock runs down fast. The ball detaches from a scrum and falls to a Magnus player. Belatedly, Jon realises it’s fourteen—Tim—as Tim goes rocketing past defenders. He’s fast as the bolt from a crossbow, but more wily by far, twisting away from grabbing hands and launched mauls. A legion of stripe-jerseyed opponents is hot on his heels.

Sasha is on her feet, cheering, and the students around them in Magnus uniforms shriek similar sentiments. Jon can’t believe that such a large demographic knows how the hell rugby works. Martin, too, is rapt, hands clutched together like in prayer.

An opponent tries one last-ditch tackle. Tim stumbles, caught by the foot, but wrenches free and surges for the in-goal area. With a tremendous dive he grounds the ball. A rival player lands hard on him, too late, and rolls off with great momentum. Jon’s wicked laugh is perfectly in place with the wild delight of the supporters around him. Martin clutches his arm in panic. “That looked awful! Oh my God!”

Time is up within the next minute, and the players form two neat rows in the center of the pitch that seem incongruous with the pandemonium of the actual match. The M.A. team, buoyant with their victory, exchange cheery handshakes before they file off the pitch to debrief and disperse. Sasha stands, and Jon and Martin follow her down the bleachers onto the perimeter of the pitch, where Tim bounds up to them like an excited dog.

To Jon’s chagrin, Tim does not stop bounding up to them. To Jon’s further chagrin, it dawns on him that of all people, Tim is heading for him. Jon is too late to this realisation to do anything about it.

Tim barrels into him with all the joy and force of someone whose team has just won a crucial rugby match. Before today, Jon has never before experienced the classic Stoker lift-and-spin, and it is with a warm shock that he bears the indignity of Tim hoisting him up like a rag-doll cat and twirling him in a circle. “You came!” Tim shouts over the din and sets him down as gently as a bride. “Wow!”

“Congratulations,” Jon manages, struck dumb by Tim’s beaming face in front of him.

“Don’t be so happy to see him,” Sasha warns Tim. “He was laughing the whole game.”

Tim turns to Sasha, bewildered, then back to Jon. “You? Laughing? No way.”

Jon coughs. “I may quite enjoy watching rugby.”

“Well, I’m glad you had fun,” Tim teases, “I will be your clown any day.” Suddenly serious, he turns and says, “Martin. Did _you_ have fun? Have you changed your mind?”

Martin, equally serious, says, “I have zero interest in joining your rugby team.”

“The perfect lock. And he doesn’t even know it,” Tim laments. “One ninety! Every centimeter wasted! Okay, we should get a picture together before I have to go for the prize ceremony.”

They huddle together with the field as backdrop. Martin, done instructing their victim of a photographer on the operation of his camera, slips into place behind Jon, tall enough that Jon doesn’t have to duck down. Tim throws an arm around Martin; Sasha leans closer to Jon. There’s a click. Jon, caught unprepared with the sun in his eyes, blinks in dismay as the rest diffuse from the huddle, satisfied.

“See you tomorrow,” Martin calls after Tim’s backpedaling form. Tim waves his arms up and down in response.

“I should be going,” Jon announces next. There’s homework yet undone. To Martin, he says, ungracefully, “Thank you.”

“Me?” Martin looks caught, as if in headlights. “What for?”

“Um, inviting me. I suppose.”

Martin’s smile is small and easy. “That was all Tim.”

“Still.” Jon’s gratitude is unwieldy, liable to misshape itself if he tries to express it in its whole. So, beaten, he leaves Martin and Sasha by the bleachers, turning to wave goodbye before their faces fade into impressions in the distance. On the bike ride back home he savours a good day made sweeter by its rarity.

Martin knows, innately, that the moment you lie in bed, awake, thinking, is the moment that it should be clear that you’re fucked. You have it bad. That you are, somehow, the circus’ most prominent clown, despite the fact that the circus is already crawling with prominent clowns.

He does it anyway. Jon has a little bit of a habit, to put his hand close to his mouth when he laughs, like his delight is something obscene that he needs to keep to himself. It is the opposite. How it’s mostly silent but for the shaking of his shoulders. How it changes his face completely. How it arrests every molecule of his body; how real the grin when it ends. Oh, how ironic the peripeteia. Tim would have a field day.

Because Martin has been a wretched liar. He would play rugby all the days of his life if it would make Jon laugh like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT:  
> rooms full of people Fuck Count: 4  
> elias: 1  
> jon: 1  
> melanie: 1  
> martin: 1
> 
> missed this because it wasn’t in dialogue. crap. the fuck count’s higher than i thought. martin got one at least it’s what he deserves


	16. Win Friends & Influence People

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bad decision town proper. cw for a little bit of violence (not particularly graphic) & for leitner club four being significantly meaner than library crew four /j

“You two got any official record you can show me?” says the guard at the gate, more beleaguered than skeptical. He taps his pencil against the pad of paper before him, slouched in his chair, a pair of aviators poised high on his forehead. Over them, a fan whirs with all the effort of the end of its life. Michael Crew’s eyes slant ever so slightly over to Jon.

Before Jon can say anything, Michael looks forward and cuts in, “Official record? It’s just one bloke. I don’t understand the fuss.”

The guard makes a noise that Jon can safely file under unimpressed. Jon catches on to Michael’s scheme just in time, a scheme that reveals Michael as what he really is, deep down: a person who has watched too many buddy films. “I’m really sorry,” Jon says in his best teacher’s-pet-for-three-years-straight voice. “We don’t have a teacher’s verification because we run the library on our own. We were the ones who organised this.”

Bingo. The guard’s brow furrows. “Oh. Because of Ms Robinson, right? I heard about her. Did you know her, kid?”

Jon, aware of Michael’s shark-like scrutiny, gives it the full Monty. “Yes. Our main goal now is to keep her legacy alive in the library. Mr Leitner’s a great part of that.” From the way Michael’s gaze flicks away, Jon knows he’s aced his role. 

“So if you could just let him in when he shows up,” he says with measured disdain.

“We’d appreciate it immensely,” Jon adds. For a second he thinks he’s overdone the good cop routine. Too chipper. Then the guard grunts and runs a hand over the stubble on his chin.

“Fine,” he says. “No issue. Good on you that you run all that by yourself.”

On the curving path back into the campus from the front gate, Jon and Michael are silent. When they’re far enough away from the guard, Michael puts his hand out surreptitiously. Jon meets the high-five below his waist. He says, right after, “I wish you’d let me be bad cop.”

Michael, rather affably, responds with, “Suck my dick.”

“ _Michael_ ,” Jon scolds. He’s refreshed to find that he is as fantastically priggish as always, despite the sort of activity he will be aiding and abetting this very evening.

“It’s metaphorical,” Michael says as consolation. “And call me Mike, please.” Although it’s getting late in the day, summer is still gearing up to peak, and Mike has forfeited his windbreaker for reprieve from the heat, a decision that leads Jon to realise that he has not, before today, seen Mike Crew’s bare neck. Standing on this side of him, Jon can see the branching silver scar previously kept so closely under wraps, and he feels the oddest jolt of unease travel over his skin. It’s sharp enough that he doesn’t even think to feel touched by the nickname grant.

He looks away just as a teacher on her way out of the school nears them on the path. Mike, all misbehaviour forgotten, dips his head respectfully. “Evening, miss.”

“Evening, Michael. Studying hard for GCSEs?”

“Doing what I can,” Mike says brightly. They pass by. The perennials bordering the path sway faintly in a weak breeze, as if in approval. Jon, as if he’s ever been anything close to a rebel, has to fight the urge to snicker. 

Back at the library, the meagre rest of the club has cleared out. The interior is blessedly cool. A whole other world. When Jon and Mike enter through the back door and walk in a single file through the now-empty library to the front, Gerry and Melanie are at a table, launching crushed-up balls of paper back and forth at each others’ heads. Evidently Mike and Jon were their group’s spokespeople for a reason.

“Aim for the stitches,” Mike tells Melanie, dropping into a chair opposite. Gerry shrieks his betrayal as a paper ball meets him in the face.

Melanie, angling another shot, says, “Way ahead of you.”

Gerry lifts his neglected mathematics workbook up in front of his face as defense. Turning, he asks, “How’d it go?” as Melanie’s next ball bounces harmlessly off of a wave of numbers floating upwards on the cover.

“Swell.” Mike looks around. He grabs his jacket off the back of the chair where he left it and pulls it back on in a few deft motions. “He should get in fine.” A pause. “Wait, is that my Macbeth essay?”

Gerry’s most recently fired ammunition, crushed up such that the grade and the Well Done! sticker are still visible, sits guiltily on the table in front of Melanie. “Was it your Macbeth essay?” Gerry asks weakly.

Mike smoothes it out in peevish silence while Melanie continues to pelt Gerry’s defense with paper balls of other unknown identities. “Should we put up a sign?” asks Jon, worried, to divert the fistfight he imagines might ensue. “So he knows it’s here.”

“Jonathan,” Melanie says, with full contempt, stopping her physical assault on Gerry to start her verbal assault on Jon. “Just turn your head. There are, what,” a brief pause to count, so as to keep her criticism accurate and incisive, “six two-meter windows looking in. If he can’t infer that the place with all the books on shelves is the library, he wouldn’t be a threat to our society in the first place.”

“No,” Gerry says, thoughtful. “I think you should do a sign. It would be fantastic. Welcome to the M.A. Library. Enter to experience books older than your great-grandfather’s dick, and also maybe premeditated robbery.”

“Al _right_ ,” says Jon. “I get it. There was no reason to bully me about it. Christ.”

“Can robbery be _not_ premeditated?” Melanie wonders.

“Maybe. Jon, I wasn’t being sarcastic.” Gerry sets his workbook down. He and Melanie seem to have fallen into a truce by way of disinterest. “I could get behind a sign.”

Mike Crew, who has since fallen silent, looks abruptly over his shoulder. The three others follow his line of sight instinctively. Jon can’t see anything of interest. Mike has gone perfectly still, in that way he sometimes does, like a lake of water freezing over all at once.

“Is he coming?” Melanie guesses. Like Mike is a well-trained dog alert for guests.

“I don’t know,” Mike says. Then: “Do you smell that?”

All three of them take deep breaths in through their nose to see if they can find an answer to Mike’s question. Jon tries to pick out anything new from the faded odour of old pages and antique wood. “Books?”

Mike frowns. “No.”

Melanie says, “I don’t smell anything.”

“What do you smell?” Gerry asks Mike.

“Like something burning. But not fire. It’s cleaner,” Mike says. He turns back, clearly abashed. “Forget it. I thought I could smell it.”

Jon sniffs. “Maybe describe it better?”

“Like after a storm,” Mike adds, impatient. “Where it’s kind of sweet.”

“Ozone?” suggests Gerry.

“Yes, exactly. Ozone,” Mike says. With both hands he fits the bottom corners of his windbreaker together and zips the front up all the way to the top, sealing his scar away again like an unwanted tenant. “It’s probably nothing.”

The four of them fall back into the kind of tense lounging-around they’ve been doing all day. Jon tries to catch the scent of anything other than the musk of the cold air-conditioner draft, the usual library smells, but comes up empty-nostriled. Halfway into the waiting game Gerry pulls him to his feet to go size up all the Leitners they have on hand. Gerry, crouching to dig in his schoolbag, produces more. They make a deadly stack on the counter: the Sanskrit Urn, and the two that Gerry’s brought from home to loan to their noble cause.

Meanwhile Melanie and Mike trade uninspired conversation. (Melanie, while flipping through a largely-blank worksheet: “Mike. What kind of Asian are you?”

Mike, picking his head off the table: “I haven’t heard that since kindergarten.” 

“Really? I have.”

“They learn to ask it in less inane ways. If you want help with your homework, I don’t speak Chinese.” 

“God damn it.”

“My family’s from Vietnam.”

“I don’t care.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”)

At around six-thirty, Gerry slides off the counter where he’s been idly tapping his heel against, and says, “He’s coming. Get ready.”

Jon squints, but he can’t see any sign of anybody through the windows. Nevertheless, having learned to trust in Gerry’s intuition (for fear of the better word), he fixes his collar uselessly. Mike and Melanie sweep up their books and papers into some order and sit up straight. Both of them look to the front door, faces turned and devoid of expression. A pair of fraternal horror-movie twins.

Gerry, for some reason, strips off his Year 11 tie and presses it into Jon’s hands. He disappears into the back reaches of the library before Jon can say anything. Jon, flummoxed, turns the tie over in his hands to check for anything crucial, but it’s as regular as ties come, Magnus green and cheaply made, with an eye Sharpied on the back for, it seems, good luck. He stuffs it into the pocket of his school slacks.

Exactly sixty seconds after Gerry’s announcement, the shape of a man appears in the distance, seen through the windows, approaching the library. Even the vague silhouette is contrary to Jon’s imaginings. Too short already. If this keeps up, Jon thinks, Jurgen Leitner is going to walk through the door, and he is not even going to have a mustache. God forbid, Jurgen Leitner is going to be _blond_.

Jon meets him at the door as he enters. Jurgen Leitner is clean-shaven. And blond, going steadily grey. To Jon’s abject horror he’s wearing a pastel dress shirt and pants, conjuring the image of a cream-filled pastry somehow turned human. There’s a work bag slung over one of his shoulders. And not a bloodstain anywhere in sight.

“Good evening,” Leitner says first. For God’s sake, he doesn’t even have an accent.

“Evening,” Jon replies cordially. Leitner isn’t much taller than him—Jon is far from tall, but Leitner meets his eyes without having to look far down. Without thinking he extends a hand to be shaken. “Jonathan Sims. We’re glad you could come down here today.”

Leitner grips his hand briefly, strongly, releasing it after only a moment. There’s something oddly warm about him, something blissfully jovial. Jon finds it hard to keep a hold on his initial disappointment; Jurgen Leitner seems like someone he’s known for years. And hasn’t he? “It’s my pleasure. Very kind of you to offer what you have. And, for no price, or have I misinterpreted your emails...?”

Jon clears his throat meekly. “Of course. Although if you were inclined to make any donation to the school, we would be in your debt forever.” Even as he says it, he feels like a wretch.

“Ah,” Leitner says. “I see. Well, if it gets me a nice plaque somewhere on campus, perhaps.” At the table, Mike and Melanie are still seated, looking faithfully across at the two of them. At the sight of them, Jon’s head begins to pound. Is he forgetting something? He’s not sure.

“Certainly,” says Jon, rather than examine what exactly is happening in his head. “Gold, if you’d like.” What is he saying?

Leitner smiles, slow and pleasant, like his prize horse has just won an expensive race. “You can expect a donation, then.” He sets his work bag down on the table where Mike and Melanie are, nodding to them. “Watch my bag. May I see the books?”

At his words, both pairs of eyes swivel diligently to the plain black work bag. Something in Jon’s brain tries its very best to right itself again, but fails, presumably, Jon isn’t quite lucid enough to tell. Neither Melanie or Mike moves a muscle. Mike’s hands are folded in his lap, still as stone. Melanie is watching the bag like her life depends on it.

Jon is already at the counter where the stack of books is. He picks up the Sanskrit book first and hands it to Leitner. When the leather-bound volume passes from his hands into Leitner’s he has the sudden, irrational urge to tighten his grip and draw the book back. It doesn’t present itself. The book passes safely into Leitner’s rightful grasp.

Leitner flips the book open and scrutinises the bookplate. “Remarkable. Where’d you get this, young man?”

Jon’s tongue loosens itself. “Most of these books just appear in our circulation. This one’s been here since Gertrude Robinson’s time.”

Tucking the Sanskrit bone book under one arm, Leitner extends a hand for the next book. Jon fumbles to give it to him. It’s Gerry’s googly-eye one. At the very bottom of the stack, Jon looks into the cover of the Plague Year, come again to the Magnus Library. This book is another creature. A true blight. He remembers telling Gerry to burn it; to not let it fall into the another person’s hands. But that can’t be right, because Jurgen Leitner is its rightful owner, and Jon wants so badly to return it to him. He could be a good man, despite Jon’s initial reservations. Charismatic, even.

Leitner has finished examining the second of the volumes, shutting it and placing it with the first. When he reaches for the Journal of a Plague Year, Jon, head pounding in earnest, hands it to him without protest.

He’s flipping through the Journal when Jon is distracted by something behind him. It’s such a picture that Jon forgets to say anything, his mouth opening in wordless confusion. The approach is swift and silent. By the time that Leitner looks up and notices that Jon is staring over his shoulder, it’s too late.

Gerard Keay brings the folding chair down on him with all the force of his sixteen spiteful years on earth (revealing Gerry as what he really is, deep down: a person who has watched too many WWE matches). Something gives way with a _Crack!_ and Jon barely has time to jump back in horror as Leitner keels over in front of him with a grunt, out like a light (a Leit?). The books he’s holding sprawl out at Jon’s feet. Jon’s brain unscrambles itself in what feels like an instant.

Gerry, plucking one earbud out of his ear and stepping around Leitner’s unconscious body, says, “He almost had you.”

Jon presses one hand to his temple in a futile effort to soothe the throbbing. “Is that a folding chair?”

Sometime between his disappearance and now, Gerry has ditched half his school uniform, standing in front of Jon in a black, sleeveless singlet of an undershirt that Jon does suppose is more suitable for aggravated assault. He’s tucked it half-heartedly into his school slacks. On one bicep, normally concealed by uniform sleeves, is a small, poorly-executed stick-and-poke of a stylised eye. He unfolds the chair and sets it down beside Leitner before dropping to his haunches. He puts a hand to Leitner’s neck, stands once he’s found a pulse, and says, “Magnus boys make do.”

The spell broken, Mike and Melanie are on their feet, picking through the interior of Leitner’s work bag together. Gerry moves first, abandoning Leitner’s still form to join them around the table. Jon gathers the fallen books and follows.

Mike extracts the culprit book. It’s a hardback, off-white and butter-yellow, the plastic jacket taped onto the book itself, font on the cover announcing the title as _HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE_ , by Dale Carnegie. “You have got to be kidding me,” says Melanie. Someone has painted a thin coat of the same yellow over Dale Carnegie’s face and replaced his features with repeating swoops of black ballpoint ink.

“Way to make it obvious,” Gerry says. (“What?” from Mike.) “It’s the Spiral.”

Jon says, “Those are concentric circles.”

Gerry snipes back, “If you would stop being the smartest ass in the room for one second.”

Mike, tired of the banter, opens the book to its inner cover. The bookplate looks back. For a second all four of them look into its printed depths, the maddening profusion of lines. Simplicity made dizzying. 

“I heard Charles Manson used this book to convince people to kill for him,” Gerry says. “Un-fun fact.”

“This book?” Jon is skeptical.

“Not _this_ book. A copy of it that probably wasn’t even supernatural.”

Melanie’s eyes are still trained on the bookplate. “We need to burn this before he wakes up.”

Mike Crew steps back from the table, still holding the Leitner. None of them understand soon enough to stop him. When he begins to flip through the book, Gerry is the first to speak.

“Crew. The book.”

Very pointedly not looking at him, Mike says, “Please put your shirt back on.”

Gerry straightens like he’s been struck by lightning. The expression on his face isn’t offense, more bafflement, all his previous apprehension gone. Jon can see in his eyes that all thoughts of the book have been forcibly ejected. “If...if you want me to?”

Jon has to catch his wrist to stop him from disappearing in search of his school shirt. Behind Mike, Melanie grabs for the book, but Mike sidesteps her, still reading.

“ _Mike_ ,” Jon hisses. “Quit it. Give me the book.”

Mike turns to him, and Jon is sure that it’s over for him again, that he’s about to be _influenced_ , the second in Mike Crew’s potential Leitner-tome-fueled, evil mind-control empire. But Mike’s lips part without a sound. His hand freezes above the page he’s turned to, and as if on their own volition, moved by an invisible gale, the pages flip all the way to the end. The book teeters in his hand. Mike has gone exactly, precisely, still.

Before, Jon had likened it in his head to frost, like water turning solid in the bitter cold. Now he sees it for what it must be, in truth: not a lake freezing. A rabbit immobilised. A prey animal waiting for the teeth to meet its neck.

And right on the heels of this realisation, Jonathan Sims smells ozone.


	17. Lichtenberg

In a few very fast seconds Mike Crew surges into action, stepping forward and dropping the book into Jon’s free hand, then scanning the library before him with frantic flicks of his eyes. He seizes Gerry’s bare shoulder, makes a face like he regrets it, and says, “Sorry. Snap out of it.”

He’s moving again right after. With horror and confusion Jon realises he’s heading for the back door. “Where are you going?” he demands. By now Gerry seems to have regained himself enough that Jon can let go of his wrist. The ozone has thickened; the ozone has gone forth and made descendants of itself. It’s a touch hard to breathe.

Mike stops, standing by the folding chair and Leitner, and looks back over his shoulder. His face is strikingly pallid. “Stay here and you’ll be safe.”

Gerry takes his hand away from where it was pressed between his eyes. “None of that.” He steps away from the table and toward Mike, and Jon and Melanie follow, albeit more tentatively. “What do you have to do?”

“I have to _go_ ,” Mike replies. “Do not follow me.”

He seems to realise that delivering this imperative is exactly what will cause people to follow you, but it’s too late. With a soft noise of frustration he turns again and makes for the back of the library, but Gerry and Melanie weave in front of him like a river. “If you’re in danger, we’re in danger too,” is Melanie’s reasoning.

“You’re not,” Mike counters. “It’s not after you. It wants me.”

“Okay, there’s no need to be egotistical,” says Gerry. At Mike’s expression he backtracks. “Kidding. Don’t hurt me.”

Mike, reconsidering his escape routes, turns on his heel in the direction of the front door that leads to the rest of the school. Melanie is faster. She and Gerry have him caught between. Jon suspects Mike’s dignity is all that’s keeping him from making a run for it. “At least tell us what’s happening.”

“Let me through.”

Jon is about to cut in with something else when the ambient electric hum crescendoes and the bulb overhead explodes in a thunderclap of sparks. Someone yelps, possibly him, as he throws his arms up in defense. Shards rain down like little supernovas. Melanie, swearing, brushes glass out of her hair. When Jon puts his arms down tentatively, Mike is already moving, disappearing behind a shelf towards the back of the library with Gerry in hot pursuit.

The book is still in Jon’s hand. He huffs in panicked disbelief and spins to Melanie for some advice, any advice. From outside the library there’s the distant, rolling boom of approaching thunder. The ozone smell is fainter now, like Mike’s slipped it into his breast pocket and taken it with him.

“Well, hell,” says Melanie, and turns to sprint after Gerry and Mike.

While Jon stares after her, frozen in place with indecision, the body near his feet begins to stir. A torsoful of glass shards sweeps to the floor. Jurgen Leitner, possibly deeply concussed, sits up woozily and accuses, “You knocked me out.”

Jon cracks the book open and meets a page that says _THE ANATOMY OF A CONVINCING STATEMENT_. “I did not,” he says. It’s technically true.

“You didn’t,” Leitner agrees. Wow, is it that easy?

Jon, unnerved, closes the book again, tucks it under his arm, and books it (ha!) after the other three. Behind him he can hear the sounds of Leitner straining to his feet. Highly likely that that is not ideal, but Jon can’t worry about that right now. He’s just in time to see the back door swing shut—beyond it there’s a second where the patter of drops on the pavement and the heavy scent of coming rain are laid plain, but the door closes with a heavy click and the library is thrown back into silence and the smell of the failing air-conditioner.

He wrenches the door back open and comes face to face with the convening storm. The droplets descend with little licks on his face like an excited dog meeting him for the first time. The concrete ground is wet to its center already. The moment is warm, in contrast to the cold of the library, but then the wind picks up and Jon feels it shriek past him, chill as a sword through the gut, eating all noise in its way.

So—he doesn’t hear Leitner behind him. It would be worthy comeuppance if Leitner had beaned him over the head in return and stolen the book back, but to Jon’s utter luck, he doesn’t. Jon startles when he staggers out of the library to stand beside him.

“Some storm,” Leitner shouts over the sound of the wind.

“What?” Jon shouts back, unsure if he misheard or if Leitner is really trying to make small talk with him right now. Some way out of the library he can see shapes that look like they could be Gerry and Mike. Shrouded in the cover of the now-pouring rain, they look possessed with the force of whatever words they’re trading, or maybe they, too, just have to shout to be heard over the sound of the storm. One shape jabs a finger into the other’s chest with unmistakable animosity.

Another shape peels away from the indistinct mist of the rain and advances to Jon and Leitner, who are still huddled underneath what scant shelter there is jutting outside the outer wall of the library. Through the pelting rain Melanie’s pointed, furious face melts into clarity as she draws closer. The nylon surface of her Magnus windbreaker is beaded with rainwater. Her hair is plastered in a black sheet to her head. She opens her mouth to say something, and—

Lightning strikes somewhere close by with a godlike crack. The sky is apocalypse-white for an instant, unbearable with the acrid of ozone, before it thunders back to deep evening blue. Jon jumps out of his skin. Melanie, unbothered, says, “So this is pretty fucking ridiculous.”

“Yes?” Jon says as she joins them under the shelter, wringing her hair out. She’s agitated.

Shouting a little louder than necessary, she says, “Apparently they couldn’t have their lover’s quarrel inside where it’s dry.”

Jon squints into the rain. The confrontation in question seems to have degenerated into gesturing. “What are they even arguing about?”

“That’s the thing,” Melanie says tightly. “I cannot for the life of me tell.”

“Can’t hear or can’t understand?” The ficus in the pot, to which Jon’s bicycle is attached, collapses onto its side with a mighty crash, bowled over by an overachieving Boreas. Now that it’s bested the fig, it’s going to get a good grade in being a wind, which is something that is both possible to get and normal to want.

“Bit of both!”

Beside him, Leitner makes a sound that almost disappears to the wind. Jon looks over. Leitner’s eyes are elsewhere, their weak blue focused on something up the path. Jon follows his line of sight and has to do a double take.

Up on the rise of the slope is something that could be a man but clearly isn’t; it’s too bright. It’s blinding against the late evening. It’s transparent in the way of a peculiar aquarium fish, with inner workings that are less inner workings and more a mess of fractals clustered in flicking branches. It sears a not-man-shaped spot into Jon’s vision before his eyes look away of their own accord, keeping its coruscating form in the periphery. It looks like if lightning struck and stayed. It’s dizzying. “Do you see—” he tries to ask Melanie, but it’s clear that she’s looking at it too. In the black of her pupils its unholy light is reflected. Two fearful pinpricks of white. Her mouth is drawn, her cheek wrinkled.

Down the path the two shapes have turned and are starting their way back up, looking injuriously at each other and thus not at the strobing slip of white radiance. Gone with the storm to anyone not right beside: “I’m taller than you, it’ll strike me first,” and, right after in response, “You’re so full of shit.”

The thing flickers; Jon draws a sharp breath. In a trick of the weather it’s nearer all of a sudden, its twisting lines flashing close on the path. Jon can’t look straight at it but he can’t look away, his eyes brimming with that strange liquid light. Further down Mike Crew finally looks, too, and sees, and behind the cover of the rain goes white as his tormentor itself, all the way down to his scarred neck.

“Give me the book,” Leitner says from beside Jon.

Jon is too absolutely discombobulated to register this. Worse—he’s too absolutely discombobulated to anticipate what happens next. Leitner sees his chance and snatches the book out from under Jon’s arm. He yells in outrage, tries to grab at Leitner to get it back, but it’s too late. Jurgen Leitner thumbs his book open and steps out of the shelter into the rain.

And Melanie takes Jon by the wrist to haul him back to the door of the library. “He has the book!” Jon yelps, and tries to yank himself free (fails).

“I know!” Melanie shouts back. “I saw!”

“Then let me get it back!”

She doesn’t loosen her grip. “You can’t go anywhere near whatever the hell that is!”

Jon doesn’t have the humility to admit so soon to himself that she’s right, but she is. His arm goes limp in Melanie’s hand. The Lichtenberg figure is right up to Leitner now, casting him in shifting white brilliance. “What is he doing?”

“Doing a book recital?” Melanie tries, the barest tremble in her voice unbanished. Leitner’s mouth is moving with words that are inaccessible through the veils of tearing rain. Jon doesn’t breathe for the noxious sting of ozone. Without being aware of it, he feels Melanie’s hand drop from his wrist to his own hand; he latches on and squeezes without thinking.

“It’s not going to work,” Jon says. Obviously. Like statues they watch the man and the thing that might have been a man, the air around them incandescent with light. Jon feels his skin prickle. His hair begins to stand. Next to them, the zinc suggestion box rattles once, then again with a hum like it’s come to life. The bell on Jon’s bike, vibrating with anticipation, rings itself in tiny chimes.

Melanie moves fast. She flings the back door open with her free hand and dives back indoors, Jon still attached to her. Jon is frankly disappointed by how easy he is to drag around. Outside, the world is momentarily deafening with noise, then the door closes behind them and the only sound is them, breathing hard, leaning with their backs on the door, unsure what exactly they’ve just escaped. The raindrops on Jon’s face begin to dry in the cold.

After what feels like too long, Jon says, “I’m going back out.”

Melanie doesn’t protest. When he cracks the door open just a sliver and puts his eye to the light the road through it is almost another planet. The rain has come to a testy halt, like a feat of magic, the world silent as an empty church compared to the howling previous. A few dying droplets patter lightly on the ground. Through the crack he can see the leg of someone lying on the concrete.

He opens the door fully and steps back out. After the storm, everything has taken on a dream-like quality. Even the man crumpled on his back on the ground looks like an exquisite nightmare prop. Jon expects a puddle of blood to be pooling; there is none.

Gerry, bizarrely, is hovering by Leitner, phone out. To Mike beside him: “ _It is safe to touch someone who has been struck by lightning. People struck by lightning DO NOT carry a charge._ Three different websites say the same thing.” Mike replies with something barely audible, and Gerry says, “Do you think I _want_ to touch this bloke? I don’t. Worst case scenario is he’s not breathing and I have to do mouth to mouth.”

“Don’t be obscene,” Mike snaps, but Gerry is already kneeling. He passes his phone to Mike as he checks for a pulse. Leitner’s still form is heavy with rainwater, his eyes closed, face smugly serene. His thin thatch of blond hair is even thinner, dissolved in the rain like damp cotton candy. The book has fallen artfully out of his grip and into a puddle beside him.

“I hate to say this,” Gerry starts with his hand to Leitner’s carotid. “But I think you have to call.”

Mike turns away from him in wordless assent and taps a couple of times on the screen, then puts the phone to his ear. Jon is near enough to see his hand trembling. Jon is also near enough to see the polaroid of Gerry and Oliver Banks through Gerry’s clear phone case, and, additionally, a Five Guys receipt. “Is he dead?” Jon asks, fearing the answer. Softly: “Hell’s bells.”

Gerry looks up at Jon and says, surprisingly stably, “I think so.” He tries a finger under Leitner’s nose for any trace of a breath. “He’s not breathing at least. I lied. I’m not going to do mouth to mouth.”

Melanie, coming out of the library behind Jon, says, “Jesus.” Jon has never been religious, but if Jesus suddenly materialised to fix this mess for them he would not be opposed.

Gerry says, “When help comes we can act like we were doing CPR all along.” Jon isn’t sure if he’s joking. (Mike has ventured away, back turned to them and a hand cupped over the speaker to block out any incriminating background conversation. “Magnus Academy. The one near the Thames Embankment. Out behind the library. No, the rain’s stopped.” A pause. “My friend’s checking right now.”)

Jon supposes this was the outcome they were aiming for, technically, but he feels unpleasantly numb anyway. He breathes in through his nose, long and shaky, and can taste a bit of that fading ozone. Gerry sits back with his knees up beside Leitner, and, eyes closed, touches absent fingertips to the two half-healed fault lines at his temple. Now Jon can tell that he’s perfectly serious. It occurs to him, then, that there is a lot he doesn’t know about Gerard Keay.

“What’s our story?” Melanie asks. “That we just decided to frolic in the rain for no reason?”

Jon is grateful for the distraction. “We were on our way back in. Got caught in the rain.”

“That’s good. What did we go out for?”

If Jon is coming up with alibis, he has less time to think about what the alibi is for, which is ideal. “Drinks.” He puts out his hand. “Do you have cash on you? I’ll run and get some from the vending machine.”

Melanie pulls an only moderately-soaked wallet out of her jacket pocket. “I’ll go with you.”

When they get back Mike is just done with the call. He puts the phone down, takes one look at the array they bought with the last of Melanie’s money—Lucozade Sport in Melanie’s left hand, Coke in her right, Ribena open and being sipped at in Jon’s—and says, “Why on God’s green earth do you have drinks?”

“It’s our cover story. He got struck by lightning on our way back from buying them. Do you want this Coke or not?”

“I’ll take the Lucozade.”

“No. It’s mine. Get your own.”

The rain is gone, entirely, but the dark clouds hang around overhead like they’re expecting an afterparty. Mike doesn’t move for the Coke. With measured slowness he drops to sit beside Gerry, a pair of mourners keeping a graveside vigil, wan and wet to the bone. He passes the phone back to Gerry without looking at him; his hand hasn’t stopped trembling. Standing as he is, Jon’s view is good. Mike is about to draw his hand back when Gerry catches it in his.

Held still by Gerry’s, Mike’s hand doesn’t shake. Gerry asks, “Is it often?”

Mike answers, “A bit.”

“Since that?” Already they’ve traversed into territory that is incomprehensible to Jon, listening in discreetly.

“Yeah.”

“You reckon it’ll come back?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Gerry shifts so he’s facing Mike, turning those canny eyes on him, knowing and brown. Mike’s face turns too, just the slightest degree. Whatever Gerry sees in it, he says, concerned, “Hey.”

“It was supposed to be me,” Mike says, and to Jon’s horror, his voice is way thicker than it should be. Mike Crew—always blasé, composed, independent—now—the thought is outrageous to Jon.

Gerry, fiercely, counters, “That doesn’t make it your fault.”

“Doesn’t it?” Mike is urgent with despair.

Gerry releases Mike’s hand and reaches up deliberately to catch both sides of Mike’s head. He’s twisted, almost to his knees, to look Mike full in the face. “Michael,” Gerry insists. Today is a day of firsts. Jon stops feeling horrified and starts feeling excruciatingly awkward. “It was his own hubris. Not your fault.” He’s quiet, pensive, looking at Mike without saying anything. He says so softly that Jon has to strain to hear, “I know it feels like it is. But it’s not. Do me a favour and believe me?”

There’s a small sniffle that Jon is discomfited to realise has come from Mike. Gerry’s thumb swipes something wet away from Mike’s cheek, but Jon is frozen, still quietly looking on. “Can you please put your shirt on,” Mike says with the same anguish as before.

The edge of Gerry’s mouth quirks as if to say, _That’s my Crew._ He makes to stand, but Mike grabs his wrist before he can turn away. Gently, Gerry says, “I can’t put my shirt back on if you don’t let me go.”

“Then don’t,” Mike replies, so easily dissuaded. Unspoken: _Stay._ Gerry sinks back down. Jon, who has just about had enough for today, glances at Melanie. Sometime during this exchange she looked up at the sky and hasn’t looked back down since, her jaw set and arms folded over her chest. Jon feels a pang of a kinship as he takes a long sip of his drink. The clouds have begun to clear, and the evening persists, life prolonged by summer. Some storm. To quote a dead man.

**Jonathan Sims**  
Hey

 **STOKEY**  
heehyyhy ;/;);;;))

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Very sry but are any of you free right now

 **Jonathan Sims**  
I’m kind of at the police station . And I don’t have money for a cab or bus or anything

 **sasha 🕯**  
how do you be kind of at the police station

 **sasha 🕯**  
but more importantly what happened???????

 **martinb**  
^ ???

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Tell you if you come and get me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rooms full of people Fuck Count: 5  
> elias: 1  
> jon: 1  
> melanie: 2  
> martin: 1
> 
> gerry had one too but i took it away for propriety’s sake. tragic, but, i mean, two fucks in one chapter? we’re a respectable establishment


	18. Intermission

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no plot. all bants

Martin shows up in a cardigan and almost-pyjamas, which is exactly what Jon would have expected him to show up in. Even though Jon sees him three days a week, he still manages to be taken aback by the volume and frenzy of curl on his head, black-brown and somehow more mussed than usual. He’s got a ring of keys hooked on a finger, and in the same hand, a box of fruit juice that Jon is certain is post-dinner refreshment interrupted and then brought along for the ride.

Jon stands from where he’s been seated by Melanie on the world’s most beaten-down chartreuse couch to meet him midway. “Hi?” he says.

Martin descends on him like a blade of a guillotine on a Frenchman’s neck. “Are you hurt? Oh my God.” (“No,” from Jon.) “Are you in trouble?” he tries again. (“Don’t think so,” says Jon.) Martin’s face, dour with worry, gets dourer. “You’re sure you’re not hurt anywhere?”

Jon, just to be sure, looks down himself to check. He’s left his jumper back in the library, and has spent the past hour or so shivering in the cold of the station. Neither Melanie nor Mike have deigned to lend him their jacket. “I might have caught a chill,” he ventures.

Martin looks about ready to pass out from the sheer force of his fretting. He shrugs out of his cardigan at light-speed and foists it upon Jon in a fawn-coloured woolen bundle. When Jon, paralysed, doesn’t put it on immediately, Martin sighs and takes it back to spread it over Jon’s shoulders for him. The cardigan is afire with his body heat, and Jon, still dazed, blinks unintelligently at Martin.

A passing officer, stopped by the sudden appearance of another unaccompanied teenager after nightfall, starts, “Young man—”

“Can we please have _one_ moment?” Martin cuts him off way more acidly than Jon thought him capable of. He turns back to Jon. “I’ll get you something warm. Sugar?”

“Oh, um, yes, please,” Jon says. Martin disengages from him and heads with purpose toward the instant tea machine on a side table.

Gerry, on his way back and sipping his own tea, follows Martin with his eyes as he passes. He’s left his school shirt back at M.A. Sometime following their questioning he’s popped into the lav and reapplied the dark under-eye circles that got washed off by the rain. Once he’s close enough to Jon, he puts his paper cup down and says with astonishment, “That boy is in love with you.”

Jon, alarmed, says, “Who told you that?”

“My eyes in my face,” Gerry answers. “Just a heads up, the tea is going to suck. Trust me.” He takes a last pull of his own and drops the cup into the bin.

“I think you should examine the nature of your own interpersonal relationships before you try to examine the nature of mine,” Jon cuts back. He looks pointedly over Gerry’s shoulder at one of their windbreaker-wearing co-conspirators. Seated on the couch, arms crossed, Mike doesn’t look back; his eyes are fixed on the curve of Gerry’s still-exposed bicep, his face scrunched as if in pain. When Gerry, following Jon’s line of sight, turns around innocently, Mike’s head swivels left to watch the clock on the wall instead.

“There’s nothing to examine,” Gerry says. “Anyway, are you two taking the bus? I’ll tag along.”

Of all the places Gerry could be, the bus seems to Jon one of the most incongruous. He’s not sure how else he expected Gerry to get from place to place, though; possibly he thought that whenever Gerry needed it a vintage black limousine would screech to the side of the road for him to slip into and disappear. “Alright,” Jon says, apprehensively.

Martin, done with the machine, brisk-walks back into earshot with a steaming cup of tea and hands it to Jon. “Careful. Hot.” Jon takes a sip of the tea; the lenses of his glasses go opaque with fog. The tea is just as bad as Gerry promised. Never the expert at keeping his emotions off his face, he grimaces, then grimaces harder when he realises he’s grimaced. “How is it?” Martin asks.

Jon figures he might as well be honest. “Tastes like hot spit. But thank you. Sincerely.”

“Oh. That’s fine. You don’t have to finish it.”

“I’m going to,” Jon tells him. He downs it in one scalding gulp. It warms him to his toes, spit-taste and all.

It might be his imagination, but Martin looks slightly touched. “Do, um, your other friends need help getting home, too?”

“I think they’re waiting for their parents.” What a concept. “We can go?”

Martin leads the way out. Gerry gives a sombre wave goodbye, as does Jon; Mike returns it with the listless raise of a hand, Melanie with two affectionate middle fingers. Outside, they pass a bespectacled woman who looks eerily like Melanie, on her way in. Jon looks back over his shoulder through the glass of the door to see the middle fingers stored away just in time.

To Martin’s credit, he waits the whole walk to the bus stop to ask, “So what on earth actually happened?”

“It’s a long story,” Jon says evasively. Gerry gives a vague sound of assent.

“Don’t give me that.”

“You might not believe me.”

“Don’t give me that either.” Martin crosses his arms in the night chill and scans the road, alive with headlights, for buses. He sighs. “Was it something like the dog man? You know I’ll believe you if it is. I know something’s up.”

Jon stops fiddling with a loose wood button on Martin’s cardigan and starts to wriggle out of it, but Martin stops him in his tracks with a fierce shake of the head. Cowed, Jon goes limp again. He says, “Well. Something like that, yes. But nothing like the dog man itself. Are you sure you don’t want this back?”

“I’m not cold,” Martin says, and drops his arms to prove it. “You keep it. Anyway.” He reaches over to dip his hand into the pocket of the cardigan at Jon’s hip and extracts his wallet. Mercifully, he’s too focused on its contents to notice Jon jump out of his skin at the contact. He produces an old, battered Oyster card, faded in flecks like frost on a window, and offers it to Jon.

“Thank you,” Jon says. He’s prepared, this time, for when Martin takes out his own card and slips the wallet back into the pocket of the cardigan. It’s still jarring.

Beside them, Gerry clears his throat with grace. Jon looks over. “Well. That’s my bus.”

“It’s mine too,” Martin says. Jon eyes the bus routes printed behind him, then the number lit up on the front of the impending bus: what luck. It’s his as well. There’s no escape tonight. “Yours?” At Jon’s nod, he says sternly, “Great. Then we can get some explaining under way.”

Standing on the bus between Jon Sims and the frightening semi-goth in the black undershirt, Martin is grateful that he’s already divested himself of his cardigan, because he’s starting to feel very, very warm.

“Like I said,” continues Gerry to his left, louder than Martin would advise. “You have no need to be sorry. It’s better that he’s dead.” A couple of sedated night commuters lift their heads at his words, but Gerry glares them back into submission.

“I know it’s far-fetched,” Jon says. To Gerry, he hisses: “Do you not have an inside voice?”

“I do,” Gerry answers. “I just like being a nuisance in public.” With the hand not holding the piss-yellow bus pole he kneads the side of his head, just below the menacing rows of stitches that carve down it. Before they boarded, Jon returned him his green Year 11 tie, and now he wears it yoked backwards around his neck, granting his ensemble an energy equal parts arresting and absurd, like trouble if trouble had had too many underage drinks at a latchkey friend’s house and still deigned to patronise London public transport on the way back home.

“It is far-fetched,” Martin admits. “Not saying I don’t believe you.” He pauses politely as Gerry cracks a yawn, clean and pink as a hound, then adds, “Must have been scary.”

Jon, cagier than usual, says, “I suppose it was.”

“I love it when you suppose,” says Gerry blearily around a closing yawn. “It’s so hot when you’re vague about your emotions.”

“A man died,” Jon snipes, changing his tune when provoked. “Yes. It was scary. Are you happy now?”

“No,” Gerry says at the same time that Martin says, “Sorry you had to go through that.” Gerry turns his head to look at Martin, eyes narrowed, and finds the same expression waiting for him in Martin’s face. Gerry, for one, looks like he hasn’t slept in days, with a twist to his mouth that makes him seem like he’s about to start spewing inauspicious omens. Martin, on the other hand, is still holding his empty juice carton. He looks away before he embarrasses himself.

“A-nyway,” Martin diverts, face hot. “What are you going to do over summer break?”

Jon makes a sound both puzzled and amused at the non-sequitur. Gerry, after a second of brief, deep thought, says seriously, “I’m going to figure out how to get myself disowned.”

Choosing not to ask, Martin continues, straying further and further away from the day’s tragedies, “I hear the National Gallery’s got this free membership thing happening.”

“Sounds nice,” Jon says, perking up. Gerry _hmmm_ s in what Martin assumes is agreement.

“Yeah. There’s this Copernicus exhibit,” Martin says. “Conversations with God?”

“That one’s nice,” Gerry says. Martin’s world, shifted on its axis, tries its best to re-conceive of Gerry as a person who frequents art museums. “Gallery’s got some good Caravaggios, too. Like the one with the lizard.”

“The what?”

“You know, the one with the lizard,” Gerry repeats, already typing something into the search of his phone. Incomprehensibly, he quotes, “Ad te reptani, puer insidiose, lacertae Parce: cupit digitis illa perire tuis. Martialis.”

Jon says crossly, “Not all of us speak Latin.” Martin, who was about to ask Gerry where he learned Italian, closes his mouth.

“There’s not enough evil tomes in your diet, then.” Gerry turns the screen of the phone so Martin and Jon can see the Wikipedia page of the painting. It’s a lush, dark, Baroque sort. For good measure, he translates, “Spare the lizard which crawls toward you, evil child. It wants to die in between your fingers. Or something like that.”

“I assume there’s something metaphorical about this?” Martin hazards. The painting, bizarrely, is of a boy, aghast, and a nearly-indistinct lizard hanging onto his ring finger by its jaws. “I cannot fathom what though.”

“Me neither,” Gerry concurs and keeps his phone. The smile that follows transforms his face. “But I like it. It’s great.”

“You have rather unconventional tastes,” Martin remarks. The bus jerks as if in offense.

Gerry says, “Ouch.”

“Not a bad thing. Maybe I’ll go see it.” He’ll be more taken with the gallery’s Van Goghs, but now Martin thinks to himself that it’s quaint, to check out a painting so loved by someone else.

“We can go together,” Jon suggests, then, diffident, turns his face to examine the kitschy blue print on the bus seat to his side. He adds, “If you’d like.” Which is absolutely, stranglingly unfair, all of it.

“I would,” Martin says. Too quickly. He tries not to wince. Jon looks back at him; it’s Gerry’s turn to nonchalantly examine the pattern on the floor.

“Okay,” Jon says. His dark eyebrows knit. That perfect space between them furrows like fine cloth. He says, “Text...me?”

Martin collects himself back from where he’s flown over the moon to remember to be polite. “Sure. Do you want to join us?” he asks Gerry, hoping his voice doesn’t betray how giddy he feels.

“No way,” Gerry replies instantaneously. He clears his throat. “Sorry. I mean. No thanks. I’ve been there.” Martin can’t help but be delighted. Gerry, fidgeting with the metal through the cartilage of his ear, and clearly trying to present some consolation, says, “But. If either of you want to get your ears pierced over break. I do have a coupon.”

“Dear Lord,” Jon interjects. “They have coupons for that?”

“It’s not the most reputable establishment.” Gerry scrapes old black polish off his nail and flicks it away from his fingers. “Is that a no?”

“It’s certainly not a yes,” Jon says. Martin gives Gerry a thin smile that he hopes conveys the same.

“Okay. I’ll get my lip pierced.” Gerry considers this. “Maybe I’ll bring Crew to use it.”

“Are you allowed to have your lip pierced?” Martin wonders. “I mean, in school. I know Jude Perry did her helix and got hunted for sport by every prefect until she took it out.”

Gerry scoffs. He tucks hair behind his ear and presents it to Martin for viewing. Five in total. “Yeah. Rules say one per lobe and nowhere else. Did you know the trick to not getting booked is to run faster than them?”

“You’re their most dangerous game,” Jon says dryly. “Do you think you hold the record for most broken school rules on your person?”

“Probably. Every day I bring dishonour to the name of the Magnus Academy.” Pointing to an inner curve of his ear, bracketed by two twin studs, Gerry says, “Also. I think this one might be infected.”

Jon recoils. “Heavens.”

“I’ll take it out when I get home. You don’t have to make that face.”

Jon carries on making that face. He eyes Gerry’s rook stud with suspicion. “I think I’d get my ears pierced. In the future. But probably not from a coupon.”

Gerry and Martin brighten at the same time. Both notice, and they share a perfunctory, distrustful look, before Martin says, “I think you could pull it off.”

“I think so too,” Gerry says. Martin has the distinct feeling that him and Gerry have entered some secret form of conflict. “Hey, Martin. Isn’t this your stop?”

Martin looks up, alarmed, to discover that it is. “How’d you kn—”

“He’s psychic,” Jon says with disdain. “I’ll pass you your card Friday?”

“Sure, um, bye—” The bus screeches to a halt by the stop as Martin fumbles for his own card.

“Oh! Hang on, your—your cardigan,” Jon, struck with realisation and flustered with it, tries to worm his way out Martin’s cardigan.

Martin taps his card. “You keep it!” To prevent the worst from happening he hops out the second the doors slide open. Turning backwards to wave, he shouts to an open-mouthed Jon and an indifferent Gerry, “Good night!” The doors close on them like stage curtains, the bus heaving away slowly at first, like a large nocturnal animal. Martin finds himself alone at the stop, irrationally flushed. 

So maybe the rest of his life is an intermission. When he gets home the house is dark, and quiet enough to prove his point. He hooks his keys by the door and creeps to the bathroom. In the yellow light of the bulb he looks at his face in the mirror, and frowns, helpless, still caught on the thought of Jon’s ears, the lobes pierced in some distant future, Jon swamped in Martin’s too-big cardigan, or, worse: Gerry Keay’s soothsayer eyes. He runs cold water over his face, and, dragging a wet hand over it, thinks to himself that it’s probably about high time he stopped googling _am i gay quiz._

Back on the bumpy journey of a London bus, it takes Gerry approximately two smug minutes of silence to say, “Soooooo.”

Instantly, Jon stops pinching the knit of the cardigan between his fingers and snaps back, “Let’s not be frivolous.”

“I was just going to say I can’t believe you left out the part about the folding chair.” Gerry’s eyes are wide and guileless. 

If there were a folding chair at hand, Jon would be tempted to use it on him. “Do you _want_ him to turn us in?”


	19. Intermission, Extended

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the s in summer break stands for sI’m converting temporarily to chatfic

**library**

**martinb**  
so anyway if you two wanna come we’re going on thursday

 **SASHA JAMES**  
honestly so shocked and upset rn.

 **sasha 🕯**  
that’s not me

 **SASHA JAMES**  
i have been dreaming every day of visiting london national gallery with my dearest friends ..... martin blackwood...jonathan sims ....sasha james ....

 **SASHA JAMES**  
i mean not sasha james bc i am sasha james

 **martinb**  
you can come with us if you want I literally just said you could

 **SASHA JAMES**  
to even THINK that i wasn’t invited ...

 **martinb**  
I JUST INVITED YOU

 **SASHA JAMES**  
hurtful. no words. don’t even hmu

 **martinb**  
sasha do you want to come

 **sasha 🕯**  
yeah why not!

 **SASHA JAMES**  
i would love to

 **sasha 🕯**  
mr stoker identity theft is a very serious crime

 **SASHA JAMES**  
sorry i don’t know a mr stoker?

The first day into his summer break Jon tries his hand at potholing and delves deep into the recesses of his grandmother’s storeroom to try and unearth his long-unused bike helmet. He finds it, but only after close to an hour of knocking over dust-filled incense burners. Holding its buttercup-yellow polycarbonate girth in both hands, Jon is overwhelmed by the fact that it is very much not his colour, and also a little bit guilty that this is the first time he’s seeing it in years. Suffice to say, he has not been the safest rider.

So it’s with some pride that he wears it that afternoon when he bikes to the store for errands. He finds himself picking through the faces he passes on the way, not willing to admit to himself the person that he’s looking for. Whoever it is, Jon doesn’t see him, and once he pulls into the bicycle bay outside the supermarket he’s long succeeded in concerning his brain with other matters.

The cool of the supermarket is bliss. He gets to enjoy it for roughly three minutes before he enters the dairy aisle with his grocery bag slung on his back and sees, of all people, Melanie King. She’s holding a box of what, by the red cow on its side, looks to be cheese, and talking animatedly to what, for all Jon can tell, seems to be the freezer. Then, like the mask falling in slow motion away from the face of the murderer in a slasher film, she takes a casual step backward to reveal her actual conversation partner: Georgie Barker.

“Yeah, you could use it like you use regular cheese, but I’m telling you,” Melanie is saying. She’s some ways down the aisle, but her voice carries. “These are crazy good on their own. You can just peel it and put the cube in your mouth.”

“I’m not sure if I believe you,” Georgie says. Jon, frozen, considers whether making a run for it will draw more attention to himself. Any course of action would be too late. Georgie’s eyes drift slightly and land on him.

“Believe me. This one’s ham fla—“ Melanie breaks off as she follows Georgie’s line of sight. “Oh, look who it is!”

His life might as well just end right there. To make matters even worse, his brain chooses that moment to realise that, like a fool, he’s still wearing his damn helmet. He fumbles to release its strap and drops it into his empty grocery bag just as Melanie strides up to him. She snorts, still holding the box of cheese cubes in one hand.

“Safety first, huh, Sims?” Melanie jabs. Georgie, attached to her, trails behind.

“Hi. Melanie.” Jon can’t yet gauge whether this interaction is meant to be friendly or hostile. He coughs, then adds, “And Georgie.”

“I’m not going to rob you. Loosen up. We’re blood brothers by now.” Apparently the former. United by lightning. Melanie, in her own peculiarly raucous way, seems pleased to see him—she holds up the box of cheese. “Have you had these? Aren’t they great?”

“I don’t believe I have,” Jon says. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“Bollocks,” says Melanie. Muttering to herself: “Bloody ridiculous.”

Somewhere in Jon’s head, a thought blinks into existence. “Say. Aren’t you lactose intolerant?”

Melanie pauses, frowns. “God damn it. You’re...how’d you know?”

Jon, flummoxed, isn’t sure either. “You must have told me?”

“Right. Probably. God, you’re right.” She glares malevolently down at the box. “I don’t suppose this is worth it.”

Over Melanie’s shoulder, Georgie meets Jon’s eye. The look they share is full of unexpected, reticent mirth. It catches Jon off-guard like an arrow through the chest.

“I’m going to put this back,” Melanie declares with ponderous sadness. She ambles back to the freezer, away, leaving Jon and Georgie alone and abruptly awkward.

“Hi,” Georgie starts shyly in her absence. “I swear you two hated each other just a second ago.”

“I thought so too,” Jon admits. “Does she just...forget? That she’s lactose intolerant?”

Georgie pairs a small, fond exhale in tandem with the pressing of her lips into a familiar line, one that Jon knows conceals a smile she would rather hide. “Last week she vomited her milkshake all over my shoes.”

“Good Lord.”

“I think it only started this year. I didn’t know you could just get it like that.” Georgie puts her hands together behind her back. “It’s horrifying to think about.”

“You could take coconut milk. It doesn’t have to be awful.” Jon’s grandmother, the staunch coconut milk advocate, would agree. “Speaking of coconut milk. I need to get some. Curry tonight.”

“Words can’t describe how jealous I am,” Georgie says. Melanie, empty-handed, rejoins them. “So, bye? Nice seeing you.”

“You too,” Jon says, just as Melanie says, “Horrible seeing you. Goodbye.”

They leave the aisle, jostling each other good-naturedly, and Jon turns to the freezer, watches the fog of condensation swirl in the air when he opens its door, and, just the way Georgie does it, thins his mouth closed to keep from smiling.

**.**  
hey

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Who is this

 **.**  
it’s me jurgen leitner

 **.**  
back from the dead. i’m very displeased with you young man

 **.**  
tonight at midnight sharp i’m going to eat your soul

**This number can’t receive messages right now.**

**.**  
hey no

To: sims_jonathan_2022@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
From: crew_michael_2021@magnusacademy.edu.uk  
Subject: please

can you unblock me i’m sorry for pretending to be jurgen leitner

**leitner laddies**

**g 👁**  
sat 2pm used bookstore hopping yes/no

 **melanie**  
calm

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Ok

 **.**  
i’ve got band practice

 **melanie**  
???

 **g 👁**  
show’s over what are you even practicing for

 **.**  
coachella

 **g 👁**  
hahahaha so funny /SARCASM

 **.**  
ok no need to be mad because we didn’t let you join

 **g 👁**  
I’VE BEEN PLAYING DRUMS FOR THE PAST SIX YEARS AND JUST BECAUSE MY NAME

 **g 👁**  
ISN’T MICHAEL!!!!!!!!!!!!

 **.**  
lol

 **.**  
i can do friday though

 **g 👁** is typing...

They spend close to three hours in one aisle alone: Gerry swearing on his mother (admittedly not a powerful swear) that it’s got something, Melanie and Jon skeptical, Mike sullenly trusting without admitting it. This bookstore was not floor-planned with four teenagers per aisle in mind, and summer, by now, is in full swing, although still the half-hearted season it will always be in London until the icebergs are gone and a new climate eats Europe. Still Jon suffers. Mike, on the other hand, is wearing an austere turtleneck, looking like an under-grown English major. Gerry, also immune, is wearing leather.

Gerry finds his prize just when the rest of them have given up. Jon, by then, has a £3 Steinbeck picked out, having been provoked successfully by Gerry about it (“What? Never read The Grapes of Wrath? That’s shameful.” Unbeknownst to Jon, Gerry has not read anything by Steinbeck in his life, either.) Mike and Melanie are watching grown men do dangerous flips on Melanie’s phone, with commentary from Mike. (“Subpar,” once. “Lackluster,” for another. “Will you be quiet,” from Melanie.) Gerry says, “This one,” and the other three snap to attention.

The book is thin, flimsy, and overall quite burnable-looking. There’s no bookplate, like now that Leitner is gone, his eldritch library no longer sits at the forefront of odd books. They pay up and shuffle out in a mismatched procession, stretching stiff limbs and newly-settled joint aches from crouching to squint at bottom shelves. The sunlight is immobilising; they stand blinking and squinting, bathed in warmth and not happy about it. A sliced-open van sits dormant outside, lit up with the fairy-light string of an ice cream stall and tending to a scattered handful of customers.

Out on a summer break afternoon—who is this new Jon, with all the things to do? Stealing licks from Melanie’s popsicle, getting tricked into reading Great American Novels. None of this particular group would fain to call the rest their friends; they’re peculiar in that way, like philandering boyfriends un-eager to answer when you ask _What are we?_ That’s just how they operate.

Sitting on noisy metal chairs and letting their ice creams melt onto the table, they each take their own gander at the book. Melanie, after one glimpse of the first page, hands it off to Jon, who reads much the same before he gives it to Mike. Mike takes his time. The book is an uninspiring horror-genre debut with a cover featuring several people screaming (always a classic). Gerry, cryptic in the fashion he so relishes, calls it one from the Buried. Shortly after this announcement, with a nigh-imperceptible shiver, Mike passes the book back to Gerry, looking sharp with disappointment.

They burn it where there is the lowest concentration of parents to catch them: Jon’s backyard. When it’s gone to ashes they go inside. Jon tries to teach them to play bridge, to middling success. Gerry and Melanie try to teach Jon a pastime he never got the hang of: gossiping, to great scandal. (From Gerry: “You don’t think so? Truthfully?”

Jon, trying to compose himself, says vaguely, “Maybe he’s got a nice face.”

“A nice face!” Melanie and Gerry crow in near-unison. They break off into their own beliefs. Melanie: “He has the kind of face serial killers will murder to pull off his skull and wear.”

“He could be in clothing advertisements,” says Gerry, much less morbid (surprising). “He could do runway modeling. I bet he’s built from rugby.”

“He’s not that tall,” Jon counters. “Just above average. Martin’s taller.”

Mike, quiet for most of the exchange, says over his hand of cards, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

“I’m just saying, you have to be _towering_ to be a model.”

Swerving away from the obviously sensitive subject, Gerry asks, “But is he any good at rugby?”

“I don’t know what good at rugby looks like,” Jon admits. He puts down an ace; Melanie grins. “His team did win the finals in June, though.”

“Swoon,” Gerry says, deadpan. “Crew. Are you out of anything?”

“No communicating,” Melanie snaps.

“Spades,” says Mike.

“What? Spades is trump.”

“And I’m out of it.” At Gerry’s expression he shrugs. “You asked.”

“We’re going to lose.”)

Sometime later Jon’s grandmother concludes her afternoon nap and emerges to appraise his newly-acquired other teenagers. Linen-shawled, salwar-kameezed, and lined impressively about the brow, she’s appropriately taken aback by something so novel. Mike Crew, loved by parents of friends everywhere, strikes up an engaging chat about the tea she’s started to make. Gerry, determined not to be outdone, sits himself on the kitchen counter and discusses her coffee machine. Melanie and Jon sit in pained silence.

After she’s retreated to her room to begin the daily phone calls to her eternal rotation of friends, Gerry says, “You look like her.”

“Excuse me.”

“Same hair,” Mike adds. Jon’s hand flies up to the silver in his sideburns. Mike grins openly; so does Gerry. Always on the same side but so rarely obvious about it, they’ve united to taunt Jon. “Don’t cry, old man. It’s very striking.”

“I’m not going to cry,” Jon replies, like a six year old. He’s spent so long feeling ancient that this juvenile statement comes out of his mouth as a weirdly pleasant surprise.

“Silver fox at sixteen,” says Melanie. She is, after all, a pioneer in taunting Jon.

“Not sixteen yet. In September.”

Gerry lies back on the couch. Behind his head flakes of black hair dye disembark from his almost-mullet to live on the cushions. A bobby pin dislodges itself from the side of his hair, following suit. “How does it feel?” he asks. “Existential? I know my sixteenth birthday was existential.”

“Not really.” Jon considers the question. “I feel like I’ve waited centuries for it. It feels more like sixteen hundred.”

There’s a pause while three different people formulate their quips. One of them is faster than the others. Mike says, “It looks more like sixteen hundred, too,” and narrowly escapes the deck of cards that rockets past his head and onto the floor.

**Jonathan Sims**  
https://youtu.be/NJYpXDMPlKA

 **martinb**  
???

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Dog

Before the museum, they have Camden Market, and a bike ride through Hyde Park, all of which Jon is a touch surprised to be invited to. The bike ride is likelier for him, Camden Market, though touristy and not a Sims scene per se, he finds he enjoys.

Sunday: sporting his yellow helmet, he rides between Sasha, up ahead, and Tim and Martin, on a rented tandem bicycle (Martin’s cycling starter kit). The park is lush, green, and on the better end of the mend from the music festivals, with only a few crown jewels of plastic lounging tastefully around. During the ride Jon swerves to avoid an empty mineral water bottle, and not long after hears Tim (at the helm) shriek before the crunch that tells Jon that they’ve hit it straight on.

After they tire of pedaling they set themselves loose on foot to the vast reaches of the whole glowing park. They act like a foreign family on vacation: Martin with his camera ushering them into ergonomic rows and permutations in front of springing fountains, Tim their scapegoat when it comes time to ask a stranger for an assist. They’re even matching, coordinated the night before over text, in their school house shirts: Tim and Sasha in Smirke, Jon in Magnus, Martin in Lukas. When Jon turns his back to watch a pair of pochards, the owl on the back of his shirt stares out at the Smirke snakes coiled around crests with an unspoken _I’m watching you._

Jon’s summer proceeds in an unfolding of sights, and tastes, and bouts of unexpected laughter that beset him more often than he thought possible. They trek through knee-high grass or through trinkets laid out on plastic mats for a pound each. He and Tim eat smoky meat off the same skewer, Sasha talks him into a game of air hockey at a pop-up arcade, Martin presents to him a glinting double ring, meant for two fingers and shaped like a bicycle.

And he laughs enough to last him six centuries. He’s uncontrollable; Martin whispers him a joke, or Sasha sneezes loud enough to pop an eardrum, and suddenly he’s off, convulsing silently behind one hand. This new wonder, laughter, his friends’ or his own, fills him with a lifting air, a breezy windedness capable of wiping clean any foul mood. He wonders if the past few years were really as laugh-less as he remembers. He wonders how he ever survived without it.

On the second-to-last day of August, the night before they’re due to visit the gallery, he empties an old bag to pack it for the day and discovers, at the bottom, a single picture. A sterile polaroid, all white corners. Most bizarrely, it’s of him: his professor’s glare, the flash of white at his temples, a solo shot. He can’t ever remember having it taken, but it clearly was. All around him is the chiaroscuro black of a punishing flash, like an astronaut alone in the enormity of outer space. Just him. Caught by a dislike that startles him with its intensity he zips it into the front pouch of the bag and out of sight. 

**library**

**REALTIMSTOKER**  
where are u two

 **sasha 🕯**  
me and tim are so super lost

 **REALTIMSTOKER**  
but in a fun way we got to talk to these old people :)

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Copernicus

 **REALTIMSTOKER**  
ok got it

 **sasha 🕯**  
no you are not at the copernicus exhibit

 **REALTIMSTOKER**  
we’re there rn

 **REALTIMSTOKER**  
where are u two for real this time!!!

 **martinb**  
that is classified

 **Jonathan Sims**  
Lol

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> new year means i am back in school so chapters should be slower than usual..if they’re not that means i’m neglecting my not small amount of work and ought to be beaten off of this website with a stick


	20. Libraryinth

“You say it was different,” Jon says half-over his shoulder. A picture you might find in a Magnus yearbook, washed in midday brilliance: Jonathan Sims, running on four and a half hours of sleep, his arms full of crisp textbooks, his new tie knotted with exemplary care, according to the two different videos he watched the night before. The perfect Windsor. They pass together through a silken diagonal of sunlight cast through a window. “How so?”

Tim, flattening down his own already-rather-flat tie, cries, “In everything! The shelves were taller. All the way up to the ceiling. And I think the ceiling itself was higher. No skylights.” A step behind fast-walking Jon, he makes an effort to catch up beside. Jon speeds up to match it. “Boss. Maybe slow down. Un-grease these wheels.”

“Time waits for nobody,” Jon snaps. A vaguely-familiar girl bears down; Jon weaves around her to turn the corner and descend the spiral. Another yearbook shot, with the rhythmic hypnosis of a twisting staircase centerpiece. He takes the stairs two at a time.

“Tim Stoker wants to know if Time can take exceptions on a case by case basis.” Tim follows, continues. “Everything was bigger. Denser. It was an absolute maze.”

Jon, loath to play devil’s advocate but fain to keep his reputation squeaking, says, “And you were of entirely sound mind throughout this whole incident.”

“I was.” Tim, sulking now at Jon’s doubt, clomps louder shoe-steps at his heels. Jon aborts a wince. “I’m not secretly on drugs. Or anything. Ignore that that’s exactly what someone who’s secretly on drugs would say.”

Jon settles for worrying at the inside of his cheek instead. His life would be leagues easier if he could afford to not believe Tim. “Tell me more.”

“Well. I walked a bit to try to get out. Didn’t work.” Tim pauses, remembering. “It was really cold, too. Even with my jacket. There was a wind coming in from somewhere, so I followed its direction, but it only seemed to get me more lost.”

“Did you read any of the books?”

“Yeah,” Tim says, revealing himself, too, to be another candidate for Dead First in the Magnus Horror Flick. “I thought maybe they would be clues. Like props in an escape room. But they were just books? I tried a few. They were all the painful nineteenth-century kind. Magnus Library typicals.”

“Nathaniel Hawthorne?” Jon suggests, just as Tim says, “There was this Nathaniel Hawthorne—”

Tim continues, bemused, “How’d you know? It was an anthology thing. Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man, and Other Stories.”

Jon, uneasy like someone’s walked across his gravesite, shuffles his textbooks closer to his chest. The staircase spits them out at the building’s sprawling foyer. The floor is a languid chequerboard of milk-white and veined sage-green, the sound of Tim and Jon’s footsteps across it punctuating their conversation in little stone strikes, two bishops taking a diagonal in a blown-up chess game. “So obviously you got out. How?”

“I’ll get to that. Be patient.” Past the pouring tributary of students going the other way, they cross the threshold where foyer gapes into atrium, open space that seems to exists just for the sole purpose of smugly confirming that _yes, it does in fact get bigger_ flooded with natural light like a pair of sun gods decided to have a pissing competition directly through the glass-dome ceiling. Students loiter; suffer bouts of shrieking laughter beside marble statues of past principals. A passing boy in an identical Magnus windbreaker accosts Tim; with a simultaneous, clandestine declaration of “O-wls!” they clinch hands in a lightning-fast secret handshake and then pass each other, grinning, without a single other word. Rugby, Jon thinks, might as well be a cult.

“I am very patient,” Jon claims impatiently. They’re in the second week of their first semester, form classes freshly reshuffled, and Jon is still unsure whether he’s to be exasperated or charmed with his new class companion. Set loose in another school term, Tim has since A) been caught by a teacher for having an entire lunch meal in a box below his table during physics period, complete with drink, B) removed his Year 11 tie and swung it into the ceiling fan, to mass panic, and C) uprooted a handful of wispy white-bulbed weeds during morning break and brought them to Jon in a mini bouquet. One thing’s certain: a Stoker day is never a dull day.

Now, Tim’s recentest hijink appears not to be one of his own making. “I put the books away and I checked my phone, hoping to text someone or google for help or something. But there was no signal. Of bloody course there wasn’t. And the time was stuck. I know because I stared at it for way longer than a minute. It didn’t move, just stayed at 6:31.

“I sat down. I’d walked around inside there for what felt like an hour. So I think it was deserved. It was then that I heard the voices.”

At last, Jon slows his stride. He looks over to Tim in alarm. 

“I heard you,” Tim reveals, quizzically, looking back at Jon in a way he hasn’t before. “And Martin and Sasha. Maybe some other people.” He gives his tie a one-handed tug like yanking on a string to turn on a light. “Far off—what sounded like far off. But I could tell it was you guys, you guys talking and laughing and all of it. You all sounded really happy.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Jon comments. He’d left early that day—by half past six he would have been mired in his homework at the empty dinner table.

“Sure.” Tim shrugs. “Doesn’t. But it’s what I heard.” A hiatus to trade enthusiastic _Hi!_ s with a group of ponytailed ex-classmates. He continues. “If I followed the voices they got fainter. When I retraced my steps they started to come from the opposite direction. And so on.

“After a while I was about ready to accept that I might die in there, listening to my friends having fun elsewhere, without me. I thought I would lie down for a bit. Make the most of the free time. But I felt my phone buzz.” They reach the end of the atrium and take a minuscule flight of flat stairs up into a dimmer stretch of wide hall. “It was Danny. My brother. He’d texted me that Dad was showing him old Rugby World Cup games, and that I should get home soon because the All Blacks were playing. And what do you know,” Tim says brightly, “When I looked up from my phone the evening was back. The shelves were a normal height and I could see the counter—I looked up and the sky was pink and everything. The time on my phone fixed itself. It was hours later.”

“Hmm,” Jon remarks noncommittally. He hasn’t quite shaken the someone-walking-over-his-grave chill. Tim carries on.

“I went out front to leg it out of there, but someone was about to come in,” he says. “Which was weird, considering the time.”

“Who?” Jon demands, done with all the god damn stalling. What is this, an official statement? A court account?

“Oh, it was Mr Dekker,” says Tim. Appeased by the answer, Jon speeds up again, plowing past a glass case of gleaming trophies. “He didn’t seem surprised to—now _who_ is that sexy, sexy man?”

Struck dumb by so irrelevant a query, Jon snaps his head back to see Tim ogling his own reflection in the mirrored metal border of the trophy case. The mental image of a serial killer yanking Tim’s face off to wear it rises to the top of Jon’s mind unbidden. The price of gossip. “Are you quite serious?”

“I have recently been through something rather traumatic. Let me be vain for just one second.” Tim drops his hand from his chin and hurries to catch up with Jon. “Anyway. Mr Dekker. He saw me and he was all—“ Tim drops his voice to an action-hero husk, “ _What happened inside there?_ So I told him. I was too tired to care if he believed me or not. He said, _Follow me,_ and I followed him to his office. Where the counseling happens, I suppose. He made me tea. Did you know he wears the same glasses as you? He does it better, though.”

Jon doesn’t dignify this with a response. Tim continues. “He got out a notepad and started asking me questions about what happened. I thought maybe he thought I was losing it and he was going to refer me to some specialist but I asked him and he said that wasn’t what he was doing.” A deep breath to replenish his spiel. “So I asked him what it was if not that and he said that _Something dangerous_ was probably happening—in the library. He asked me if I’d seen a book. I said. Uh, yeah, sure, it’s a library, there are tons of books, but he said No, I mean a different book. A book that _felt like the root of the maze_.

“I thought about the Hawthorne one. But it didn’t feel like how he said. It was just a regular book. So I told him no, I didn’t see a book like that. At which point he said an un-school-counsellor-y word, under his breath.” To add spice to Tim’s retelling, raised voices jumble behind an ornate door as Tim and Jon walk by (a clipped, bureaucratic “—don’t appreciate you in my business, Peter,” and a lower “I haven’t done _anything!”_ that has Jon burning to stop walking and put his ear to the door). Tim pays no mind. “He said something about _if Gertrude was still around,_ which he didn’t explain.” The voices behind the door fade out of earshot as they continue on.

“He asked me if I’d been to the second floor, which, of course I have. He asked if the new library was like that. And, come to think of it, maybe he was onto something. So I told him _Sort of but not really_. He asked me _Why not really._ I told him it was a lot colder, for one.

“And for another. Every time I’ve gotten lost in the second floor I was with Sasha or Martin. Or both. So it was never really that bad. The library labyrinth was a lot less fun because I was alone.”

If before, Jon felt like someone was passing over his grave, now he feels himself distinctly within it, getting passed over. “I would hardly call the second floor fun.” His last second floor encounter had involved far too much eldritch dog.

“To each their own.” Jon has the sneaking suspicion that Tim could probably find a way to have fun in Tartarus, so long as he had a friend to conspire with. “Mr Dekker went silent after I told him all of that. Wrote a lot on his notepad. Then he told me not to stay in the library alone anymore, and to update him if anything happened. Also he let me see his photos from when he was in Nepal after I asked. He was kind of dreamy when he was younger. Not that he’s...not...never mind.”

“Okay,” Jon says, choosing to ignore all of Tim’s Adelard-Dekker-related opinions. “And?”

“And I’m here now. Telling you this.” They’ve finally reached their destination. Tim drops his schoolbag outside the library and squints into the unassuming interior through the glass. “And when Sasha and Martin get here I’ll tell them too.”

“When they get here,” Jon echoes. He puts his bag down, light-headed. “I think I have some things to tell them as well.”

Sasha, having to feel it to believe it, like a modern Thomas the doubter touching his saviour’s stigmata, shakes the leather-bound book with all the force she can muster. A patter of tiny bones rains down at her feet. Martin makes the same drawn-out, deflated-balloon noise again. “This is new.”

Jon believes now that the shaking of the bone book has become a rite of passage. An initiation for the veiled side of the world to gently haze you. It’s also the most convenient way to prove that he’s not a charlatan. “I reckon it is.”

“Where are they coming from?” Sasha wonders. She purses her lips as she realises the impossibility of the inquiry. “Don’t answer that.”

“Looks like they’re coming from the book,” Tim murmurs, then flushes the shade of a carrot. “I mean. Of course. Obvious.”

Sasha turns the book upside down to check the binding; more small skeletal remains shake out like candy from a Pez dispenser. She holds it close to her face like she can see its secrets if she looks hard enough. _Cool,_ her mouth shapes to herself.

“I have another book,” Jon suggests. Sasha looks up from the Urn and to him. “But we’re going to burn it Friday.”

“You?” Tim says in mock disbelief, presses a scandalised hand to his chest. “Burning a book? For what?”

“It’s not safe,” Jon says. “Can’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“Sorry, it’s not safe? Is it going to mind control us into doing its evil bidding?” Martin says, incredulous, as he toes a tiny, dainty femur. Jon is silent for too long. Martin looks up and says, “You’re _kidding_.”

“It’s not—it’s not _mind control_ ,” Jon insists. A hassled, embarrassed pause. Jon relents guiltily. “It’s kind of mind control.”

“You can’t be serious.” Martin asks. “Who is we, anyway? Not us, I hope?”

“Melanie and Gerry. And Mike.” They’d left Leitner’s book in school the day of his death and never gotten back to get rid of it.

“I’d like to see it first,” Sasha says innocently. “Just see it. Hold it maybe.”

Jon, conflicted, accepts the Sanskrit book from her and tucks it under his arm. He thumbs the corner of its pages. “Perhaps for a minute.”

It’s definitely longer than a minute. How To Win Friends And Influence People cycles through the four of them in an inane, dizzying procession of experiments in the vein of _Give me your wallet!_ and _Um will you all turn around maybe oh God I don’t like this Jon take the book back Jon_ and _Say I’m your best fittest smartest coolest mate right now (You’re my best...) okay fine that’s enough_. When the book returns to Jon’s hands, he feels like he’s just run a marathon. The faceless Dale Carnegie on the cover is yellow and sick with mischief.

“You see why it ought to be burned,” Jon says weakly.

“Yeah,” Tim agrees. “But it _is_ kind of ace.”

Sasha, grinning ear to ear and bouncing Tim’s wallet in one hand, says, “This is like Christmas to me.”

“Are we just supposed to accept that this book...this book can...?” says Martin, looking thoroughly disturbed.

“Clearly it can,” Jon says. “Unless you would rather believe that we’re all very good paid actors.”

“Sure it can,” Tim says. “So you’ll burn it. What do we do about the library? And a better question: what the hell _is_ the library?”

Jon squirms. “I suppose it’s something like the second floor. Sometimes things in this school are wrong like that.”

“Like the water fountain water,” Tim suggests.

“Like the blood at the talent show,” Martin adds.

Sasha nods sagely. “Like Jane Prentiss’s immortal worms.”

“Like Jane’s _what_ now?” Martin beats Jon to demanding.

“You know, Jane’s immortal worms. She caught some white ones near the rugby field and they started breeding. She has dozens of them, in a mason jar,” Sasha recounts with all the hushed reverence of epic verse. “If you kill them, they come back to life, after a few minutes. I’ve seen her and her friends take them out of the jar to step on them and watch them resurrect.” Io, Paean, Io, sing! Of the schoolgirl’s insect kin.

Smash one into white spit, watch the spineless scourge reknit. “Are you sure they’re dead when they’re dead?” Jon asks, keeping his skeptic badge perfectly positioned. 

“I saw this bloke Jordan Kennedy crush one with an encyclopaedia. That book could have killed a grown man.”

Jon, familiar with books that can kill grown men, sees the wisdom in this. “So M.A.’s not all right. We’ve established that. I think we can do categories of not-right-ness—Gerry—Gerard talks about them like that, but he’s never explained it to me.”

“Talent show blood and talent show dog,” Martin starts them off. “Are the same brand?”

“The brand being talent show?” Tim asks.

“No. Maybe. I think the category is blood.”

“Then we can put the water in that group,” Sasha says. “If the water is even at all supernatural. And if the metal taste is actually blood. Probably not.”

“Blond Michael and this book,” Jon offers. He lays the pad of his thumb over the ballpoint-pen spiral on the cover. “Gerry calls it the Spiral. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

Martin tries again. “I think worms are a thing by themselves.”

“How about the new library and the second floor?” Sasha connects. “We get to name it. I think we should call it the Maze.”

Jon says, “I was thinking more the Labyrinth.”

“Pretentious,” Sasha says. “Agree to disagree.”

“Okay,” Jon says. “Any more?”

“I’ve heard of this other thing. MD told me—I mean. Manuela Dominguez. She told me that she heard that this girl her friend knows saw these figures from across the field after swim training. At night. That looked like people, made of fire.” Tim scrunches his nose. “And they disappeared when she tried to get closer. May not be true.”

“Oh—I know—sounds familiar. Category is something like, people made out of other things? Fire. Lightning.” Jon thinks as hard as he can. “The Person.”

“Let’s put the name for that one on hold,” Sasha suggests.

“The Light,” Jon tries again. “No. You’re right. Anyway. The books as a whole are a recurring thing. We’ll call it the Library?”

Sasha hums. “The Evil Library. We’re the Good Library. It’s important to make the distinction.”

“There’s something else,” Martin speaks up. He casts his eyes downwards as the rest of them look to him. “Though I think I might be imagining it. Do you ever feel like everybody sees everything you do?”

There’s a recess in their conversation as unnatural as a draft in an un-windowed chapel. Four sets of individual certainty sit quietly in the acknowledgment of something they’ve tried to ignore for years. Tim says, “I used to think it was just me being a teenager.”

“What changed?” Jon asks.

“I had to see the principal in his office this one time in Year 9. I felt the eyes every day for a week after that. I don’t think it’s normal at all.” Tim plays with the zipper of his jacket. “We can call it that. The Eyes.”

“I agree with you, and I kind of hate this,” Sasha says. “Let’s move on.”

“I think we’ll be safe from the new library so long as we’re together,” Martin says, moving on obediently. “And to be honest, I feel the watched thing less when I’m with you all.”

Tim grins. “This is the part where we put all our hands together in a stack and say Go Team,” he says. “But I’ll settle for just the hands or just the Go Team.”

Their decision is unspoken. Martin’s palm is distinct on the back of Jon’s hand, Sasha’s below and unnoticed. “Go Team,” Jon mutters venomously, fondly, right along with the rest, their chorus buoyed by Tim’s own fervent, practiced “Go Team!” as they send their hands up into the air like spray from popped champagne.

When they adjourn to their own businesses, Martin finishing overdue work (headful of curls bent low, round mouth crumpled with concentration), Tim yammering in Mandarin into his phone some distance away, Jon sits behind the counter, trying not to be affected by several things at once.

“Why the long face?” says Sasha. She’s still shaking the book of bones.

Jon can’t help it. “He’s very fluent.”

“He is,” Sasha agrees. Then, like a bragging parent, she adds, “He also speaks two dialects. You should hear it.” With her sixth sense, she ventures, “You’re not jealous, are you?”

“No,” Jon snaps. He makes a face. “Maybe. Yes.”

“You can talk to me for practice,” she suggests. “But a lot of my vocabulary is Kollywood-derived. Sorry in advance.”

“Still better than me,” says Jon, whose Tamil is of a quality that makes his grandmother’s friends swap vexed glances and recommend language tutors.

“We’ll work on it,” Sasha says. Her eyes drift to the half-done worksheet before Jon, his tiny abugida curls and strokes lying black on white. “In the meantime, don’t be too jealous. He can’t write a word of Chinese.”

Jon grunts, trying not to show his gratitude. He clicks his pen and pushes his chair back to go tell Tim to _Quiet down, this is a library,_ but he feels something give a flat, plastic crunch underfoot as he steps backward. He lifts his shoe to see a tiny replica of his own face on the floor, staring back up at him from the four-cornered captivity of a polaroid picture. The very same one. The lonesome astronaut; that classic consternation.

He looks down at himself, alone in the void, the photographer anonymous enough to be immaterial, and feels his chest pinch with dread. _No more,_ he thinks to himself, resolute if unsettled, and kicks the photograph discreetly into the slip of space underneath the counter’s drawers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haven’t edited this. lmk knowo if it shows ;;:;;)))


	21. Twin Magicians

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haven’t edited this eithef. it’s 4:02AM. i’ll look at it again tomorrow probably

**Jonathan Sims**  
This is what we have so far

 **Jonathan Sims**  
The Blood (blood)  
The Maze (2nd floor + Tim’s new library)  
The Worms (worms)  
The Spiral (the blond Michael’s thing + How To Win Friends)  
The Man? The Light? The Light Men? (Mike Crew’s thing + alleged fire people)  
The Eyes (eyes)  
The Library (evil books)

 **Jonathan Sims**  
The names are a work in progress

 **g 👁**  
god this must be what the mum and dad goats feel like when they see their little baby children jumping and tripping around everywhere

 **Jonathan Sims**  
😐

 **g 👁**  
i’m so proud of you sweetie

 **g 👁**  
fuck smirke’s fourteen i’m a sims’ seven truther

“I have a theory,” is Gerry’s starter when he appears behind Jon in the afternoon, “that I’d like to test.”

Jon looks over his shoulder at him and away from the mess of the unfinished window display. He didn’t see Gerry come in—he must’ve taken the back door. He’s wearing a gray Magnus jumper that Jon has never seen on him before, the white collar of his shirt underneath held captive at his neck, begging to be pulled out and arranged. “God grant me the patience,” Jon mutters, intentionally loud.

Gerry catches the packet that he’s been bouncing in one hand and shows it to Jon. It’s a black casino deck of playing cards. “No need to worry. It doesn’t involve any life-threatening stunts, and it’ll take five minutes, tops.”

Jon, unimpressed, rebukes with, “That is _exactly_ what you’d say if—“

“It’s the truth,” Gerry cuts him off, pushing the pack open with his thumb. He adds, “and you know it.” (Jon does.) “But I’ll wait for you to finish whatever the hell that is.” He sticks the hand not holding the cards into the pocket of his pants and wanders onward into the library, leaving Jon to his misgivings. Jon looks down at the scattered titles. He’d been planning a nice colour-themed window display for the term, which has proved more difficult than he imagined—most of the Magnus books are the miscellaneous colours of clay. He sets the mini easel he’s holding down with no book propped in it and follows Gerry.

“Wait up.” Jon quickens his pace to catch him.

“Shirker,” Gerry says fondly. “Come on.”

They settle into an alcove tucked away behind shelves. Late daylight from the window catnaps in a pale oblong on the floor, puts down chocolate shadows where it meets chairs and teenaged librarians. Gerry, pallid in the sun, holds his deck of cards out for Jon. “Shuffle for me,” he says.

“Why so secluded?” Jon asks, accepting the deck. Above Gerry’s two-tone head dust motes swirl in the light.

“It’s just more atmospheric,” Gerry says. Underneath the table, he kicks Jon in the shin. “Shuffle.”

Jon does as told. Leg smarting, he finds something else to be antagonistic about. “You know your hair is definitely not four inches above the collar.”

“Not the first time I’m hearing this today,” Gerry admits. He touches the nape of his neck, runs his fingers up through the longish hair there (overgrown from summer break) like he’s sifting through confidential files. “I always tell the prefects to bring a ruler and then we’ll talk.” Jon offers the deck to Gerry, but he pushes it back. “More thoroughly.”

“I take it lower sixth’s going great.” Jon shuffles once more in sharp, displeased pulls.

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t attend enough of it to tell.” Once Gerry nods, satisfied, Jon returns the cards. Gerry sets them down on the table beside Jon’s hand instead.

“Are you going to tell my fortune?” Jon asks, scornful.

“No,” Gerry says. He leans back sideways in his chair. The label of his jumper sticks out at the base of his neck; someone’s Sharpied an O or a zero onto the label as identifier. The smile that breaks on Gerry’s face is like dawn over a crime scene, or, if you were less poetically inclined, like a ferret. “Your job is to open the top card after I say it.”

“Simple enough,” Jon concedes. His hand hovers above the deck. “After you say what?”

“Nine of hearts,” says Gerry by way of explanation. Jon hesitates. He flips the first card of the deck face-up on the table. On it nine blood-red cordates stare upward. Jon feels a chill travel through him; Gerry’s grin grows longer and more vulpine. Clearly, he’s enjoying himself. “Keep going. Six of clubs.”

Jon opens the next—Gerry is right. He presses on. “King of spades.” When Jon opens it, the king of spades is sword-wielding and serene.

“Two of spades. No. Not spades. Two of clubs.” Sure enough, it’s clubs—identical twins of them.

“Jack of hearts.” By now it cannot be coincidence. Gerry’s eyes are half-shut in concentration, and he peers down at Jon through the slivers left. “Ten of diamonds. Five of spades. One second—ace of spades, I believe.”

The deck dwindles down. Gerry mixes jacks and kings twice, corrects himself in time once. His arms are still folded in dissatisfaction from his only slip-up. He goes slower after. “Three of hearts. Ace of hearts. Diamonds...seven or six. Seven of diamonds.” And lastly: “Easy. Queen of clubs.”

Jon flips the last card without bothering to check it and directs all of his attention to Gerry. For a moment he’s too torn-up to formulate words. Gerry steeples his fingers together and says, “Pity about those I got wrong. I’m not spectacular at cards.”

“This is just a thing you can do?” Jon finally settles on asking.

“Mmm,” Gerry concurs. “Had to practice. Like I said, cards aren’t my strong suit. Too specific. I do coins better.” He reaches a hand out and slides the deck of cards over to his side of the table, neatening the stack and commencing an elaborate casino shuffle, cards flowing from his fingers like jets of water. He sets the randomised deck down before him. “Now it’s your turn.”

Jon jerks his head up, startled. “What? I can’t.”

“Try,” Gerry says. “Just start by guessing.” When Jon doesn’t say anything, Gerry dangles a fingertip above the deck. “I heard that some people do it better when they’re asked, so. What’s this card?”

Jon, absolutely lost, guesses, “Ten of spades?”

Gerry flips. It’s the six of diamonds. “Focus,” Gerry chides. “You have to concentrate. Next one.”

Jon strains to picture the other side of the card, the way he always imagined psychic powers to work. His thoughts feel useless and staticky. “Something diamonds?”

“What diamonds?” Gerry demands. A fervent, budding tutor.

“I don’t know what diamonds,” Jon says helplessly. “Bloody...jack. I don’t know.”

Gerry opens the card. It’s diamonds after all, but the royal is a queen. Gerry makes an indecipherable sound. “Alright for a start.”

“Coincidence,” Jon says, not fooling even himself.

“Let’s keep it coming,” Gerry says. “This next one?”

“Five? Clubs.”

“Aha,” says Gerry, and flips the five of clubs face-up. “You’re getting the hang of this.”

Unsure if he’s pleased or horrified, Jon continues. The guesses swim from his mouth unbidden. “King of hearts.”

Spot-on again. Gerry, at least, looks incredibly smug. “Nice. Keep proving my hypothesis.”

“I’m not sure if I like this,” says Jon. “Ace of diamonds.”

“Not quite.”

“Ace of hearts, then.”

“That’s more like it.”

For the span of a minute, Jon’s world narrows to Gerry’s hill-knuckled hand and the fifty-two permutations stacked and waiting for him. He banishes the questions he has and does his best to focus on suits, numbers, this card and then the next. When the deck is exhausted and Gerry puts the last card open on the top of the guessed pile, his grin is somehow even wickeder than before.

“So,” says Gerry. “So, so, so, so, so.” Then, with a sudden, less-smug reverence, he adds, “It took me close to a week to get a perfect deck at that speed, you know. You are actually _very_ good at this. Must be all the time you spend in the library.”

“That wasn’t perfect,” Jon objects. “I muddled nearly all the red suit cards.”

“Close to perfect,” Gerry amends. “I reckon your next try might be.”

“And what do you mean all the time I spend in the library? Libraries make you psychic or something?” Jon reaches for the cards and shuffles them agitatedly just for something to do.

“Not all of them.” Gerry drums his fingers on the table. “Just this one.”

“Oh, of course.”

“The list of powers you sent me?” Gerry says. “Worms, Blood, whatever. The one behind this,”—he waves a hand to the deck of cards Jon is shuffling—“is what you called the Eyes.”

Suddenly, Jon is glad that Gerry chose a secluded table. He can just picture the hair-raising gaze of the Jonah Magnus portrait behind the library counter. “I don’t quite follow.”

“Like you’ve guessed, we have these evil categories,” Gerry explains. “Traditionally people in the business think of them as fourteen, but honestly, it gets counterproductive often. Your classification’s not really any better. But you got some correct. Like the Eye. The Eyes, if you prefer, or the Beholding. That one, at least, I like to think of as distinct.”

“Fourteen?” Jon is incredulous. “By Jove.”

“Yes, yes, good Lord, et cetera. Don’t worry about any of those,” Gerry says. “You don’t have to. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

Jon sets the deck of cards down. “But this Beholding has something to do with me.”

“Us,” Gerry corrects him. “This whole school, in fact. Though it does rather seem to like you,” he admits, appraising Jon through slitted eyes. “Little librarian and all.”

“Pardon?” Jon frowns. “You mean to say this...evil category, this abstract concept...likes me?”

“Think of it as a presence,” says Gerry. “Old. Powerful. Not fully sentient. If you want to understand it as divinity, then it’s the god of sight. The god of knowing and being known. It lives elsewhere—but you can still feel it here, like a song playing from another room. That’s how you get manifestations.”

Jon catches on fast. “One of these manifestations being ridiculous _psychic powers_.”

“That would be one of them, yes. But don’t call them psychic powers. This isn’t X-Men.” Gerry pulls the deck of cards toward himself and fits them back into their pack. “ _Knowing’s_ a complex phenomenon. It’s best displayed like this, with games. Where you have parameters and fixed possible outcomes. It’s not so simple in the real world. In the real world your sample space is a slider that can go all the way up to infinity. Have you got a coin? I’ll show you another game.”

Jon does have a couple, and he digs one out from his wallet while Gerry regards him studiously. Gerry asks, “So. Ever notice that you know things that people have never told you?”

“Once or twice,” Jon admits. For him knowledge floats in like clouds, largely insignificant. He’s never paid it much mind. It’s easier to assume he overheard. “Here.”

“Keep it. You’ll be tossing for me. When’s my birthday?”

“Late January,” Jon says without thinking. He looks up in alarm. “...is that right?”

The grin is back on Gerry’s face. “What day?”

“Twenty-first?”

“Exactly. Did you know Crew was born two days before me?” Gerry says. “Toss.” Jon, feeling simultaneously proud and disturbed, sends the coin into the air. Gerry says quickly, “Heads.”

Jon slaps the coin onto the counter. He removes his hand to reveal the famous, queenly, one-pound side profile. Heads.

“Once more,” says Gerry. Jon obliges. The coin spins and glints in the sunlight from the window. “Tails.” The crown full of herbs under Jon’s palm. “Heads.” Elizabeth again. “Tails.” The crown. Gerry calls every toss to perfection.

After a dozen or so tosses, Gerry says, “OK. That’s enough.” He looks softly self-satisfied. “Do you want to give it a shot?”

Jon says, “I think I would prefer not to.”

“Fair enough. Coins are harder, research shows. More dynamic.” Gerry flicks his thumb like he’s throwing an imaginary one. “The trick is to guess while it’s airborne. See—otherwise you have to ask yourself lots of irritating questions about determinism and predictability. It’s even easier if you guess after it lands, while it’s covered.”

“Hang on for a second,” says Jon. “Can you or can you not predict the future? Didn’t you anticipate Leitner back then?”

“I saw him on the path down. I knew he would be in soon. It’s different.”

Jon cocks an eyebrow. “Is it?”

“God. I don’t know. I told you, no irritating questions about determinism. Let’s move on. Do you speak any languages?”

“This one,” Jon says, purposely obstinate. “And Tamil,” he adds, when Gerry begins an eye roll. “Not well by anybody’s standards.”

“If you practice a little bit more,” says Gerry, “you may start to see significant improvements. Or not. It’s different for everybody.” He taps a finger to his bottom lip. “I don’t mean to brag, but I learned Latin in three days. Though I do suspect that the Eye had some ulterior motives on that count.”

“You’re not serious,” Jon says. “Three days?”

“Maybe three and a half...?” Gerry shrugs, insouciant. “It was tricky getting fluent. Didn’t have anybody to practice with.”

“I’ve been learning Tamil for years.” Jon is weary. “This doesn’t seem fair.”

“The Beholding’s sweet on dead languages. You could try Sanskrit?”

“Why would I need Sanskrit?”

“You could read the bone book. Finally unlock its evil side effects.”

“No thanks. I’ll see if my Tamil gets better.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Gerry folds his arms again, smiles at Jon with bemusement. “You know, most people would be more excited about this. You can study significantly less and Know significantly more during exams.”

Jon isn’t opposed to the new abilities Gerry’s laid plain to him, but it would be inaccurate to say that he’s psyched. “Sorry I’m not bouncing off the walls in joy.”

“No,” Gerry says. “This is the more accurate reaction.” His face is stern now, serious. “It isn’t a gift. It’s not even something you’re borrowing. You’re...being fostered,” he stresses. “And the Eye isn’t any less dangerous than the Spider. You’re smart to be wary.” A pause. “Smarter than I was at first.”

Jon chooses not to pry. He owes Gerry that much, considering how little Gerry has pried into his own dirty laundry. He has a single concession on the Beholding. “It _does_ seem like the start of a lifelong career in being fabulous at parties.”

The smile returns. “It’s one of the best. Maybe after the Vast.”

“The Vast?”

“No need to worry about that one. Not up your alley. Forget I said anything.” Begging for information is the opposite of what Jon wants to do with his day, so he sits instead in ticked-off silence. Gerry plays with a ring at his helix. He says, “Tell you what. There’s another knowing game people like to do. You might be familiar. It’s called Two Truths And A Lie.”

“We play that during every administration-mandated class bonding.” Jon’s voice is thick with resentment. No class bonding has ever been less than an utter torment for him.

Gerry, who seems likely to have conveniently been in foreign countries during every class bonding, says, “Great, so you know the rules. You can go first.”

Jon takes a long moment to think. “I’m bilingual. I don’t eat meat unless it’s very good. And I think you’re insufferable.”

“Oh, come on,” Gerry says, the corners of his eyes lifting. His grins always bring the healed-white scar tissue beside his eye up with them. They’re confidential, wondrous acts of alchemy, always unconsciously devious. “I don’t need the Beholding to get to the bottom of that one. You love me.”

Jon, poker-faced, reveals to the contrary, “I do eat meat. Lots of it.”

Gerry’s face sours in realisation. Even that is its own wonder. “You are _such_ a wretch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bonus
> 
>  **g 👁**  
>  hey crew. hark
> 
>  **g 👁**  
>  Forwarded ➣  
>  The Blood (blood)  
>  The Maze (2nd floor + Tim’s new library)  
>  The Worms (worms)  
>  The Spiral (the blond Michael’s thing + How To Win Friends)  
>  The Man? The Light? The Light Men? (Mike Crew’s thing + alleged fire people)  
>  The Eyes (eyes)  
>  The Library (evil books)
> 
>  **g 👁**  
>  jon sims
> 
>  **.**  
>  so true
> 
>  **g 👁**  
>  the light men
> 
>  **.**  
>  the blood (blood)
> 
>   
> 
> 
>   
> 
> 
> rooms full of people Fuck Count: 6
> 
> elias: 1  
> jon: 1  
> melanie: 2  
> martin: 1  
> gerry: 1
> 
>   
> 


	22. Daedalus Unwitting

On Wednesday Martin is earlier than usual, separate from Sasha. He comes in with his school shirt rumpled, a fluorescent streak running down the otherwise clean white, his new Year 11 tie flipped over one shoulder, deliriously unkempt. Jon, mid-yawn, closes his mouth. The ten pence coin he’d been practicing guessing lies abandoned on the counter, shield-side up. Martin’s eyes widen when they meet his. He retrieves his tie from behind him and smoothes it down like a caught child.

“Hi,” he says, breathless like he was rushing. Jon, not quite recovered from the pseudo-nap he took in his last period, gives an incomprehensible grunt as response. 

Martin, a caretaker by nature, and also, clearly, a very accurate caretaker, comes up by the counter where Jon is conducting an epic battle with his eyelids (like a retro cartoon, he can almost feel the tiny cartoon Zs floating around his head, threatening to take him away) to stand beside him. “You have got to start sleeping more,” Martin chides.

“Tell that to my History coursework,” Jon counters, looking up sleepily, irreverently. The angle makes Jon feel as if he’s craning his neck to stargaze. _One ninety!_ , his brain reminds him in Tim’s voice. All’s fair in love, war, but unfortunately, not height. Martin’s concerned face hangs foggily above him like a constellation: the Worrier. His smattering of moles individual stars. 

He sighs. “How many hours?”

Jon stretches forward on the countertop, hands knitted together at the fingers. His reply is abashed. “Three point five?”

Behind them in the library, there’s a smack like a book dropping face-flat on the floor and a Tim-pitched yell. “Sounds like a nightmare,” Martin comments. “Your three point five hours of sleep, not that.”

“It’s really fine,” Jon says flippantly. “I’m still breathing.”

“My afternoon naps are three point five hours long.” Martin pulls the second chair out and drops himself into it, still looking at Jon with that inscrutable mixture of pained disapproval and something else luminous. All knitted dark eyebrows and cow-thick eyelashes. Jon lolls his head back onto the counter. “And still breathing shouldn’t—shouldn’t be your benchmark.”

Jon takes a deep, theatrical breath in through his nose for Martin. He feels a pinch of satisfaction to see Martin’s mouth quirk up in reproachful mirth. “And yet it is.”

Martin drags the chair in, puts his own head down gently on the counter, pillowed in his arms. He’s facing Jon. “You should go catch up on your sleep at the couches or something.”

They regard each other with earnest difficulty, each their own archaeologist looking forward into untraversed yellow-grass plains. Uncharted waters. Jon is suddenly aware of the slow, slugging pump of his blood, his cheek pressed to the satiny wood of the countertop. And Martin’s lower lip, pink as paint and lighter than the rest of his face, half-bitten between unseen teeth. Looking at Martin, Jon feels it in real time as his drowsiness takes the back door out. He can almost hear the hum of his nerves buzzing awake. Martin Blackwood is a shot of caffeine, right in a vein.

Tim, appearing with an empty cart and wheeling it at a frightening velocity, exclaims, “Martin!” Several library-goers minding their own business jump in surprise (Jon included). Tim parks the book cart by the counter. “What is this? Nap time? Where’s Sasha?”

Martin sits up. “Getting math consultation.” Jon, belatedly, pulls his head up too.

“Studious,” Tim comments dreamily. Then: “You two continue your nap time if you want. I’ve got it all under control.”

Jon, feeling quite alert now, pushes himself up to stand, miffed. “No, that’s not appropriate. I’m awake.”

“Well. Alright then. I did take a gander at the back left—the meteorology shelf in particular, I think—and someone’s shuffled that one up proper nightmarish.” Tim leans into the cart as he breaks this bad news. “I would do it, but it’s just so unfortunate that these new Year 8s recently asked me to brief them about what we do in library club.”

“What is there to brief about?” Jon points out, more candidly than he’s been since he became club president. “Tell them if they have the energy or desire to start planning events we can actually do things in library club. But tell them not to expect us to do it.” He makes an additional mental note to chew Mike Crew out about respecting shelving systems.

“I’ve always wanted events,” Tim says wistfully. “Blind date with a book...Tiara Lukas book signing...”

“Plan them yourself, then,” Jon shoots. He bends to heft the stepladder propped up on the counter and makes for the back left section.

Tim turns to call after him, “This is what no sleep does to your people skills!”

“ _Sorry_ I won’t facilitate your two-bit romance novelist meet-and-greet!” Jon calls back.

Pleased with the sounds of great offense he leaves behind, Jon slips behind the cover of the shelves. The inside of his chest still rushes oddly, like it’s harbouring a river of warm blood. He feels distinctly like he’s just escaped his own assassination. At least he’s awake now. He hauls the stepladder toward the shelf Tim indicated; indeed, it is shuffled up proper nightmarish.

In the sudden hush granted by the secluded section of the library, Jon begins to sort. The first weed he pulls is a far-from-home volume on the stock market. The state of the meteorology shelves is as if someone’s shaken all the books out of them and then reinstated the volumes according to the position of the stars when each was first published, which Jon suspects is not too far off from the truth. He can almost picture them: Gerry on the ornate alcove desk, kicking his heels, the table light shrouding them in honey. Mike systematically pulling book after book out and placing them atop a stack after a cursory flip. Jon longs to have both of them burned at the stake. For now he will settle for cleaning up after their exploits.

He can spend hours shelving—it’s his hamartia. Books catch his fancy at the drop of a hat. New stories spring to his attention like suitors bearing flowers, and more than once he’s found himself not halfway through a cart, seated on the topmost platform of the stepladder, buried in bygone centuries with no mind to time speeding along around him. Today he does his best to ignore all the titles. 

He completes the higher shelves faster than normal. With his eyelids drooping again he descends the stepladder and surveys the bottom shelves—evidently the ones Mike Crew can reach—to great consternation. He folds the stepladder up and sets it aside, against the loveseat under the window. 

Seated on the library floor, he’s squinting at the back of a book to discern its genre when his ears prick to the sound of laughter. He strains to hear it, shelving momentarily forgotten. It sounds like Martin. His laugh is wide and delighted, even across a library. On the heels of the laugh is Tim, saying something at an inadequate volume. That murmur of someone else’s voice could be Sasha—Jon didn’t get to see her come in. Fixed in place by the faraway microcosm of an overheard joy, Jon puts the book he’s holding back in the shelf where he pulled it from. He is very tired. He’s certain there’s something he’s forgetting. 

Martin’s speaking now, but Jon can’t make out the words. There’s something intimately lonely in listening to the three of them. Almost like looking into a house through a far-off lighted window. Seeing distant little figures play the piano or eat a family dinner, watching colours move on a tiny TV screen. The feeling is tranquilising. Possessed by his sudden exhaustion, he slumps back, eases himself down on library parquet and folds his hands over his sternum. The ground is solid underneath him, grounding. Sleep comes for him like curtains drawing shut.

And leaves him like curtains opening on the act where the gun on the wall fires. He’s dimly aware of a ceiling far above him, and the dim impression of artificially warm light. The rest of his brain is in a fuzz. His mouth is dry, tongue glued to the roof, and his throat works for a moment, Adam’s apple rolling, until his gums unstick themselves. With some difficulty he props himself up on his elbows, blinks around until the majority of the sleep’s gone from his head. There’s a chill—the evening must be late—and he wonders if the cold woke him. His glasses cling to his neck by their steel arms. He fumbles them back onto his face.

Shelves surround him. It takes a longer moment for the dread to set in. The cold, the artificial light, the towering shelves—he puts two and two together and arrives at a terrible four. The hand he drags down his face is cold, too. He whispers, in a croak to himself, “ _Fuck._ ”

He should never have gone to sleep. He’s a bloody idiot, forgetting and going alone to fix the shelves when that was exactly what he’d been warned against. He strains to sit up. It’s just the way Tim described it, higher height-wise, the ceiling so far up Jon is half-expecting clouds to precipitate in its flat, far-up cavern and rain him out. Shelves snake as far as he can see, a chunk of a larger maze. He shuts his eyes to assuage the gravity of the situation. Already he can picture the geometric corridors of labyrinth, close-walled and claustrophobic with indecipherable formations. Overwrought books for miles.

He stands, swaying, and braces himself against a shelf. His first course of action is by far the stupidest. “Hello?” he calls down the aisle at the top of his sleep-softened voice. “Martin? Sasha?” There’s no response. Far off, there’s a sound like someone pushing a squealy cart. He follows it to the end of the aisle, where the walls of shelves take a sharp right into a new passageway. He peers in sideways and doesn’t see anybody. No cart, and none of his friends.

He stares upward at the opaque, fog-white ceiling. Then he looks down the passageway, squints and can tell that it forks into two separate paths at a T. He takes the passage down and surveys either fork; both of them fade into a shroud of mist such that Jon can’t tell if they dead-end or branch into a next. Off-put, he backtracks into the corridor of shelves he started from. He might be imagining it, but here it’s warmer, at least, and he rubs his bare arms and wishes he’d dug his jumper out of his bag before anything else.

The books on what should be the meteorology shelf are not on meteorology. Most are bare-spined. Plain leather or coated paper. Jon pulls some out of the shelf and is faced with an assault of neatly-printed Latin or Lovecraft so annoyingly rife with _shews_ and _aeternals_ that it might as well be. He puts The Outsider and Other Tales back and focuses on the Latin. He tries to glare the small words into submission. Three days, he reminds himself. There— _et_ —that’s _and_. _Est_ —that’s _is_. Those are about all he can parse with his absent, war-poems-in-English-class vocabulary, and he doesn’t see _Dulce_ or _Decorum_. After a while he grudgingly accepts that three minutes isn’t possible, so he shelves those back as well.

He goes the other way and finds it maddeningly similar to the first route he tried. But it’s this or the mist, so he hugs his arms close and continues on. The bookshelves loom on either side. All of the halcyon calm of the normal library is elsewhere, warmth leached out of every square inch, and Jon goes as quickly as he can to nowhere in particular. Some halls are as brief as a clause, others lay themselves out in lonesome, indulgent stretches. The new library is infuriating above everything else.

When the aisles get unbearable he halts and tries something else. Closing his eyes and scrunching up his face, he focuses, tries to grasp at images that could be drifting in the back of his head. He pictures each of his friends in turn, angles them in his mind as the cards he can Know with ease. Tim the jack of spades, Sasha the queen of diamonds. Martin the king of hearts. Even as he tries it his head begins to pound. He presses his palm to his forehead and tries to knead the sharp static bite away, concentrating harder, but coming up empty still. He sees no faint figure in his imagination. No coordinates align themselves in his brain.

So, great. He’s successfully given himself a headache. Swallowing a wail of frustration, he kicks his heels and just barely stops himself from attacking the nearest bookshelf. He thinks of Tim’s ordeal and wants to scream when he realises that he doesn’t even have his phone with him. If he did, he doesn’t have a little brother or a favourite rugby team, either, so no version of him is ever going to get out of this place.

There’s another sound in the distance, though not a cart this time around. A run of familiar voices. Loud enough to discern their owners but too muffled to make out any words. Jon cups a hand behind his ear; that’s Gerry, that’s Martin with his sudden, pleased laugh. He Knows it’s a trick of the maze, but still he finds his feet moving in the direction of the noise. “Martin?” he calls. “Gerry? ‘s that you?” His own voice is tremulous, but it floats up in a strange echo, shivering all the way up to the high ceiling. He walks briskly to the end of the aisle and turns into the next, chasing ghosts.

He breaks into a run. He can still hear them; he’s certain if he can get there fast enough they’ll be there. He passes shelves full of anonymous books and weaves through the cookie-cutter hallways they form, until he finds himself at another fork and stills, out of breath. In this pause he realises that the library is silent again. Nobody laughs from a far-off aisle or carries on an unintelligible conversation. He is the only person in it. Likely that he always was.

Holding the realisation in his head, he rolls the idea around like a hard, spherical stone. He chooses a direction and walks on. Grim but not entirely defeated. On his next turn he enters a corridor longer than any of those he’s encountered. As far as he can tell, the end isn’t thick with mist like some of the longer hallways. He squints and can make out the barest impression of a warm light.

Upon reaching its end, he finds a break in the monotony: an alcove desk almost like the ones in the old library. The recess is rectangular and washed in the warmth of the desk lamp, the finish on the polished dark wood gleaming wetly yellow, a cup full of pens the only occupant. A chair of the same wood is pushed halfway in at the table. Hanging on the back of the chair is a pale drape of familiar fabric. 

Jon moves closer to confirm his guess—he takes a cream-coloured sleeve between his fingers and runs his thumb over the jumper’s cuff. It’s soft from the wash. It’s leagues away from pure wool, just the under-ten-pounds, secondary-to-sixth-form-school-uniform-synthetic-fibre thing it is. It’s his saving grace. 

He pulls it on with unsteady hands and breathes it in, his core creeping back to warmth after wandering through the cold for what feels like forever. Its scent is elusive, detergent and the faintest shade of teen boy. Jon’s not so far gone that he’s memorised what its owner smells like, but he’s sure beyond a doubt that the jumper is his. 

He drags the chair out and sinks into it, pulls the jumper closer. It’s so big that it’s more blanket than jacket. He puts his palm over the scratchy silver embroidery of the Magnus owl. It takes a moment, but finally he feels his own quiet, faithful pulse, beating steadily at the inside of his chest, and closes his eyes. He slides down in the chair and into the hug of the jumper, his nose in the fabric.

Martin pokes his head around the corner of the shelf and into the next corridor and tries once more with feeling. “Jon! Tim!” he shouts, to, of course, nobody. “Sasha! ...God, this is awful.”

He listens intently again and picks out the voices further onwards down the hall, so he forges onward in the same way he’s been forging onward for the past...how long has it been? Time twists here. It feels like it’s been hours, or maybe it’s only been minutes. He takes a right and then a left and hurries through identical aisles, calling for his friends and listening to his own voice bounce tauntingly back at him.

He thinks now of a decade-ago family trip to the hedge maze of a palace that he can’t remember the exact identity of. Those were the days that his parents (plural) didn’t have to worry about money or the practicality of spending it to get a small child within some shrub walls. The memory is clear mostly because of its tactile tint; of reaching upward to hold onto his father’s hand. But the hedge maze had been muggy, studded with insects and other families with rowdy children, and frankly, the hedge maze wishes it were the new Magnus library. This new library offers itself up in terms of miles, of promises that you’ll never reach an end. 

He’d been speaking to Sasha in the regular library, walking down the space between sections, when she’d fallen silent behind him. He’d turned to see why and seen a looming shelf in her place. It was a mistake; when he whirled back around the library before him was gone, too, replaced by another shelf. He was hemmed in. It was colder, and the ceiling was higher, the labyrinth sprung fully-formed from Tim’s story. He pulled out his phone and waited to see if the time on it would change. It didn’t.

Now he walks onward with fast, abbreviated strides, taking turns at random based on an intuition he doesn’t really have. Calling for his friends. The activity helps to keep the cold at bay, but still he yearns for his own jumper. He glances at his phone often, thinking of Tim’s first escape, but the screen stays blank, date and time flashing up, a single notification from his bogus astrology app centerpiece. He keeps walking. 

He can hear Jon further on in the library. He’s been hearing him on and off since the shelves came up around him, or maybe it’s just that Jon’s voice is the most distinctive, those crisp, weighted vowels and consonants that should belong to someone years his senior, all here to roost in a fifteen-year-old’s mouth. He speaks, though distant and indistinct, and antique shops and assholes in tweed still coalesce in Martin’s imagination. Martin tilts his head and can make out the other bloke’s voice: Gerard, wasn’t it, saying something sharply, then a peal of laughter from both. Martin feels a stab of something green, like corroded copper.

He keeps walking, turns the corner when the corner presents himself, and the new library unravels its promises: he’s reached a dead end. The shelves cup together in a neat rectangular terminus. The chill here is more pronounced, with an impossible draft that comes in from nowhere, and there’s something on the floor, braced up against the dead-end shelf. As Martin gets nearer he recognises it as Jon’s schoolbag. There’s the tea stain Martin put there, amorphous in faded sepia, and closer still, there’s the speck of dried blood from the talent show that was missed in the washing. This bag’s been through a lot. A plain-canvas survivor, it has bike-chain grease down one side and a metal dog-tag that says J. SIMS on the other.

And beside it on the floor: a polaroid, face-down. Martin crouches to pick it up. It’s in colour, but just barely, the boy behind the instant-film laminate haughty in the face of the flash, alone in the picture but so delightfully present. Without realising it Martin’s making a face back at the photo, eyebrows tied together, mouth doing something funny that can’t quite qualify as a smile. It’s _him_. Silver-at-the-sideburns, stray-cat-serenading, baby-adult _him_. He’s looking into the camera like he wants it to stand outside and think about what it’s done. And Martin is thinking, all right. 

He turns the picture over; the plasticky back has the faint imprint of someone’s shoe. Martin wipes it away with his sleeve and stands up, still looking at the photo. What was he upset about? Just disdainful of being photographed? Martin longs to reach a finger into the shot and smooth out the crease between his eyebrows. Make him laugh, if he was ever capable. Martin lingers on the little details. Here: his school shirt higher on one side like it was buttoned up wrong. Here, next: a leak of light in the film that saturates one side of his face in coral. The bowls of his pupils are light-flooded, too, like little orange moons in the black space of his irises.

The photo turns out to be the perfect size for the transparent pocket in Martin’s wallet. It’s a cliche, and one he used to find banal, unromantic, but there’s hardly a heart-shaped locket on hand. He surveys the Jon glowering outward through the panel and grows flustered, so he yanks out a receipt and slips it over the picture. The perfect crime.

Just then the voice that’s been distant up to now sounds off nearer. Martin looks up, and again he hears Jon, loud enough now to be just around the corner. He doesn’t have time to process before Jon rounds the corner, Martin’s name on his tongue, hurtling toward Martin without pause, more impact than image with how fast he meets him where he’s standing. Jon is soft when he collides with him, the metal of his glasses cold when they press up to his throat. He says Martin’s name once more, panic and relief mingling, then in a rush to Martin’s shirt collar, “ _IthoughtI’dneverseeyouagain_.”

Martin can’t imagine ever being cold in the library, now, because he can feel Jon’s words at his neck and his face is _boiling_. Blessed with darker skin, no embarrassment is ever obvious in his face but for his expression, and he tries to keep that reasonable even as his brain informs him of the fact that this must be Jon holding him as hard as he can, arms tight around his waist, and even that is so sweetly lithe that Martin could disengage him with a finger. His voice resurrects after a brief period out-of-commission, and he tries a “Jon?”

The shelves have shrunk, but neither of them notice. Martin asks, in wonder, “Is that my jumper?”

Jon releases him, abruptly embarrassed, too. Martin wishes he hadn’t. “Yes.”

“It is absolutely huge on you,” Martin says. When Jon begins to wrestle it off Martin quickly follows it with, “No! No, it’s a good huge, don’t give it back.” Jon goes slack. He worms his left arm back into the sleeve.

“We’re out,” Jon observes. Martin looks around; he’s right. He’s relieved and thankful and he couldn’t care less. He leans forward and hugs Jon close again. It doesn’t look possible, but there _is_ a person underneath all that jumper.

“Glad you’re alright,” Martin mumbles to the top of Jon’s head. Jon clings back to him, less desperate but just as earnest.

“Me too,” Jon says. “I mean, I’m glad about you, I’m glad you’re alright too, is what I mean.”

Martin stifles a giggle. “I hear you.” Holding Jon reminds him of cupping a moth between his hands, and he does it as gently and fiercely as he can manage. He’s starting to see the appeal of Tim’s lift-and-spin, because Jon is the perfect size for it, and Martin considers hauling him up and twirling around before he decides not to push his luck just yet. After what feels like About Long Enough he releases Jon and says, “I wonder if Tim and Sasha are still in there?”

“Was everyone lost?” Jon asks. “Even the Year 8s? Christ.”

“Or just us?” Martin’s not sure either. He glances around, but nobody’s materialised out of the normal, regular shelves to catch them clinging to each other like children. “Come on. Let’s go see.”

They find Sasha slouched behind the counter, hiccuping quietly to herself, her glasses still fogged, and converge with questions until Tim, too, appears from the rows of shelves, eyes wide. The other people in the library come and go and talk to each other in low, confounded tones, and the sun creeps down the sky, replaced as it is in their world along with a library that doesn’t lie. Jon wears Martin’s jumper even though he has his own. When they trade their exhausted anecdotes none of them know that they won’t ever see the place they’ve just been in again, though they would be pleased if they did know. Martin, photo in his pocket, warmth on his mind, is beginning to suspect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rooms full of people Fuck Count: 7
> 
> elias: 1  
> jon: 2  
> melanie: 2  
> martin: 1  
> gerry: 1
> 
> fucks per thousand words: 0.111/k (3s.f.)  
> ∴ fucks per ten thousand words ≈ 1
> 
> OK now time for some chapters that have been here since first conception. get psyched


	23. Virgo Season

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY FOR THE MASSIVE DELAY. this got long. actually no that’s not even the reason for the delay, it’s late because i idled with this at 100 words and then wrote the whole rest of it in a blaze of productivity
> 
> yes i know virgo is barely a jon sign but it’s the sign the timeline necessitated. believe me i calculated his birth chart looked it over and went ‘hm. not him’ then didn’t do anything about it

**super secret group chat do not reveal**

**STOKE MARKET**  
can we delete this chat after it is done it makes me feel bad

 **sasha 🕯**  
why

 **STOKE MARKET**  
you know those memes where it’s like if you’re not in a group chat without this one person in your friend group then you’re the person not in the group chat

 **sasha 🕯**  
ah

 **sasha 🕯**  
okay we can delete. after

 **STOKE MARKET**  
and maybe change the name i feel like we are COLLUDING

 **martinb**  
are we not colluding though?

 **STOKE MARKET**  
fair enough

 **sasha 🕯**  
jon voice Fair enough.

 **STOKE MARKET**  
so fair

 **STOKE MARKET** changed the subject to **JONNY SIMS SWEET SIXTEEN BIRTHDAY BASH <3 <3 ;) :P**

 **martinb**  
any updates on the when yet?

 **sasha 🕯**  
at least after 10th sept. i think. we have time

 **STOKE MARKET**  
ACTUALLY

 **STOKE MARKET**  
yes update

 **STOKE MARKET**  
okay don’t panic

 **martinb**  
what

 **STOKE MARKET** added **g 👁**

 **sasha 🕯**  
:o

 **g 👁**  
.

 **g 👁**  
how’d you get this number

 **STOKE MARKET**  
hi gerard this is tim jon’s friend we were wondering if

 **STOKE MARKET**  
oh i got it from MD who got it from daisy tonner who got it from jude who got it from michael crew

 **STOKE MARKET**  
actually i probably could’ve just asked jude straight but like i prefer to keep myself alive

 **g 👁**  
that wretched little man

 **sasha 🕯**  
MD? you mean to say you got his number from a doctor of medicine???

 **STOKE MARKET**  
manuela dominguez

 **g 👁**  
hm

 **g 👁**  
gonna do that for myself. GKD

 **martinb**  
what’s the D?

 **g 👁**  
wouldn’t you like to know

 **STOKE MARKET**  
dick

 **sasha 🕯**  
dark’ness dementia raven way.

 **g 👁**  
it’s delano.

 **STOKE MARKET**  
...........sorry HAHA

 **STOKE MARKET**  
so uh we were wondering if you know when jon’s birthday is?

 **g 👁**  
one second

 **g 👁**  
september 14

 **STOKE MARKET**  
THANK YOUUUU

 **g 👁**  
yw

 **g 👁** has left the chat.

 **STOKE MARKET**  
nooooooo

 **martinb**  
R.I.P.

 **STOKE MARKET**  
i blew it with the dick bit didn’t i!!!

 **sasha 🕯**  
there’s a joke to be made there. just so you’re aware

 **STOKE MARKET**  
oh screw off

**g 👁**  
so do you leak my number to all your friends now

 **.**  
no clue what you’re talking about

The library’s almost entirely empty when Jon gets there, so in hindsight, he probably should’ve guessed.

But it’s been kind of a long day, so instead he puts his things down on the counter and empties the cardboard return box onto the cart beside it. He came down alone—Tim’d waved him along, working through the last questions of the final mathematics period, and Jon took the shortcut down instead of the long way they usually take under an unspoken agreement that they’d like to have more time to talk. Now he looks up from his work with a tinge of worry. He counts the people he can see outside through the glass front of the library and banishes any thoughts of the maze.

With the maze thoughts gone, the alternative is obvious and embarrassing. He hasn’t stopped thinking of it all week. Possibly he won’t ever stop thinking of it—thermodynamics is bogus, because his brain’s a perpetual motion machine, and it’ll think about this until he’s dead and then after. It steals him from his homework, fills his head with sleepy warmth. He puts his chin down on his textbook and lets his eyes flutter.

Until the door to the library swings open with a twinkling crash of chime and a six-voiced “Surprise!” — Jon sits up with a start, blinking profusely, to a smattering of people and a green-icing cupcake being ferried his way in Tim’s duplicitous hands. Math questions, his arse. Tim chants, “Happy early birthday...”

“The almost-sixteen-year-old!” Gerry, inexplicably, is wearing a danger-red party hat, one of two. “Were you surprised?”

Jon, who would survey the expectant faces of his friends if he wasn’t zoned in on the the thin white candle on his birthday cupcake, clears his throat. “Maybe. Tim—Tim, I hope you don’t expect me to let you light that in here.”

“I don’t!” Tim answers. “Sasha’s going to do it.”

“Happy birthday,” Sasha sing-songs as she strikes the reel of her lighter. Jon recoils in exaggerated horror; the flame hops out on the second spin, and Sasha puts it to the wick of the candle, where the fire hovers, contented. “Bear with us. We’re about to _sing_.”

“Your worst nightmare,” cackles Melanie, also in a party hat of the same shade as Gerry. Together, in halting, mismatched chorus, they begin. “ _Happy birthday..._ ” while Jon, in the manner of all introverts being sung at, sits in moved mortification. Martin, multitasking, forgoes clapping to cup his hands around the flame of the candle to protect it from the draft of the air-conditioner; Jon focuses on this instead of looking any of his friends in the eye and getting awkward.

“Thank you, thank you,” Jon manages to say at the very second the song ends. “This is all very...touching. Could you put that out?”

“ _You’re_ supposed to do it,” Gerry tells him.

Martin adds, “And make a wish first.”

“Hear that? Very touching. What a prick,” Melanie says sideways to Georgie. Jon rolls his eyes. Inexperienced, he leans forward to the candle, dithers his hands around the flame the way Martin did before. He hesitates. And finds that really, truly, he does not know what to wish for. It seems ungrateful, somehow, to wish for more when he’s already here, blowing out a candle on a cupcake brought here for him, surrounded by six people who bothered to remember his birthday.

He says another silent thanks in his head and blows the candle swiftly out. “What’d you wish for?” Sasha asks, immediately, boosting herself up to sit on the counter.

“Nothing,” Jon says. “I’ll think of something later.”

He’s rewarded with several different groans of disappointment. “It doesn’t work that way,” Tim grouses. “You’ve wasted this year’s birthday candle!”

“No way you didn’t have anything to wish for,” Melanie accuses. “I bet it’s embarrassing and you don’t want to tell us. It’s okay, every other little boy in the world wants a pet unicorn, too.” (Tim stage-whispers, “I know I do.”)

“Eat the cupcake,” prompts Georgie, around the first thing she’s said since arriving. “There’s two more in the box.” She lifts the white box she’s holding—someone’s drawn a smiley face on it with a marker.

Jon takes a bit of the icing off with his tongue, experimentally. It takes a moment for the taste to register. Sweet, heady, herbal—it’s unlike any cupcake he’s had before, though the competition is minimal and rather lax. The sweetness spreads like a long vowel in his mouth, unspooling its unexpected depths. Six faces watch him eagerly.

“This is good,” he says, with a little bit too much conviction. Six faces brighten. He coughs. “What is this?”

“Green tea!” Georgie declares. “Thought you might like it.”

“We were prepared to strip you of your British citizenship if not,” Melanie says.

“Since when is green tea the British tea?” Jon says balefully through a mouthful of verdant frosting.

“Tea is tea,” Melanie counters.

“Tea is not just tea,” Martin objects. “There’s layers.”

“If your tea is in layers I feel like you haven’t done a very good job of making it,” Gerry remarks.

“Not what I meant and you know it.”

Jon extends the hand with the cupcake back to Georgie and her box. “It’s very nice, but I don’t want to drop crumbs inside here.” She scoffs, but opens the top to let him put it back, then holds the entire container out to him.

“Happy early birthday. Me to you,” she says, a tinge embarrassed. They share a brief, bashful look, both of them still silently thinking of their falling-out, equally glad it’s over, and in strong agreement never to speak of it to each other again. Jon accepts the cupcakes.

“Oh! Okay. Present time.” Sasha rubs her hands together in anticipation. “Hey, Tim, you should go chase away the juniors.”

Tim pushes himself off from where he’s leaning on the counter, grinning. “Gladly.” Intercepting a group of them just coming in, he says, “Hey!” The younger students startle in unison. “All of you go home. It’s a public holiday. Tell your friends!” As soon as Tim turns away, the boy and girl at the back of the clique break into shy giggles.

“But—” Jon’s about to argue the merits of attendance when Gerry cuts in, “It’s St Jon’s day. Let them take the day off. Not like there’s even anything to be done around here, is there?”

Jon closes his mouth. Classic of Gerry to be right. Behind him, Jon can hear Tim repeating, “No club today! You can go home! Scram!” When he returns, looking pleased with himself, he says to Jon, “Sorry, by the way. No balloons or anything. We figured that if we lost hold of them on accident they’d pollute the library ceiling and drive you nuts.”

Of all things, this strikes Jon as one of the sweetest gestures he’s ever been subjected to. “Ah, um, thanks,” he says, appropriately touched. Was being known and known well always this gratifying?

Tim’s head swivels to Sasha. “You were right!” he says, leaning to jostle her. The look on Sasha’s face is smug as a cat’s. “Okay. Okay. Gift time. Who’s first?”

The six of them present their presents in an orderly chain, like the subjects of a king, come from far and wide bearing gifts. Cupcakes from Georgie (“I’m not a cupcake person, but—” “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” “—was going to say I might be now!”) A scented candle from Melanie, inexplicably jacketed in thick brown paper printed with the words FOR MEN, claiming to impart, bizarrely, the manly scent of mahogany. (“Where did you even get this.” “Way to spit in my face, Sims.” “Way to jump to conclusions. I’m just curious.”) Jon holds the open candle close to his nose and sniffs tentatively, then brings it to that of Gerry next to him, who says, “That’s mahogany, all right.”

Jon says, “I’ll take your word for it.”

Spot on: a sleep mask from Tim. Two open eyes, black thread embroidered on white, look outward; Gerry and Tim wrangle it onto him as he flails gamely. He sits in theatrical displeasure after they succeed, arms crossed, eyes covered. “Now you can get your sleep on,” Tim offers.

Jon says, acidly, “Now I don’t have to look at you.”

“But boss, your eyes are wide open,” Tim says, poking the embroidery over Jon’s real eyes with a knuckle.

Jon pulls the mask up to his forehead and fixes Tim with his best Withering Look. Tim, unflappable, unwithered, blinks back innocently. His smile is white and guileless. It’s hard, then, to not smile back. Jon rolls his eyes and manages.

Gerry’s present, dug out from the inside pocket of his jacket, is a thin stack of brightly-coloured vouchers that all say, with conviction, EYE HUT. “Please buy yourself new glasses,” Gerry says, weary. “Nobody finds it sexy when you squint.” Jon splays the stack out; they add up to a decent amount. He has the vivid mental image of Gerry, half-crazed, putting his palms down on the counter of every spectacle shop in London and asking, _Do you do vouchers?_ The vision brings him significant joy.

Also bestowed by Gerry: a small folded card decorated by steady strokes of ink. The front has been cleverly done up to resemble a Penguin Classic; on the inside left is a familiar rectangular bookplate, an expert’s replica. Under _Ex Libris Jurgen Leitner_ is a footnote: _Gifted to the collection of Jonathan Sims_. The message itself is perfunctory. (Jon: Happy birthday. I love accidentally killing old men with you, hope to do so again soon. Have a good one. M.)

Jon squints (which doesn’t escape Gerry’s notice). Mike’s put a dotted line underneath, to cut out the coupon he made. _One free library ejection: Present this coupon to any miscreant and they will leave* the Magnus library immediately. Single use only._

_*Reshelving of books not included. Do it yourself._

Gerry says, “He’s got something on today. Can’t verify if this something is legitimate. Though I doubt it.”

On Sasha’s turn she presents Jon with a book-shaped parcel wrapped uselessly in paper printed with sparrows. Unveiled, it’s a debut novel, reviews on the back lauding it as one-of-a-kind. “I know you have that hate-reading-the-same-stuff thing,” says Sasha. When did Jon tell her? It’s nice, to have an idiosyncrasy remembered and circumvented. Laden with so many gifts, beset by connection, Jon feels like an orphan who just received parents. Or more accurately, a boy who just received more birthday presents in one day than he has in a half a decade.

Lastly: Martin. His present arrives in Jon’s hands in a plain pastel box. He’s making the same face he made when the dog was in his jacket, as if he’s committed grievous crimes that are all about to be exposed. Jon’s eyes move from Martin’s trepidation to the box. With a tentative hand, he lifts the top, and frowns down at something tan and furry.

Jon extracts a small plush cat. He raises it up to inspect it and three voices squeal in synchrony. “Ohhh my God,” Georgie coos. Tim says, “Holy shit!”, and Sasha claps her hands to her face in delight. The three of them swarm the cat, held aloft in Jon’s palms for ease of attention. It’s the perfect size for one hand, brown as cocoa, impossibly soft. The tab next to its tail says Jellycat London. Clearly, the mid-teen soft-toy market is an untapped goldmine of a demographic.

“Name him,” Georgie prods. “Name him, name him.”

“Jurgen,” suggests Melanie, at the same time that Gerry says, “Jurgen Leitner.”

“He is _not_ going to be named Jurgen,” Jon says.

“Name him Timothy,” Tim suggests.

“If he’s going to get a person name it should be Martin,” Jon reasons. “Junior.”

“How about Magnus?” Sasha offers.

“Huh,” says Jon. “Hm. Actually, that’s perfect.”

With the library all to themselves they get up to enough no good to keep Jon stressed for the rest of his life, if not for the fact that he, too, is gleefully a part of it. With effort, Tim manages to cramp Jon precariously onto the top of the book cart and wheel him from end to end, zooming with commendable speed, Jon shrieking in horror and ecstasy all the while. Softcovers fly out of the lower levels of the cart as they race past shelves, leaving a dusty wake of desolation.

Tim deposits him by Gerry, who’s predicting cards to an adoring audience of Jon’s friends. Jon, giddy from the ride, plucks the party hat from Gerry’s head and examines it to discover that it’s an anti-drug pamphlet stapled to function. Upon investigation, Melanie’s is exactly identical.

“Being high on drugs gets you low in life, Jonathan,” Gerry portends.

“Wasted?” Melanie chips in. “So’s your future.”

“Oh, good one,” Gerry says. “Damn it.”

“It was in the pamphlet, Keay.”

“I didn’t read it.”

Jon, scanning the text visible on the makeshift dunce cap, says, “Do dope. Lose hope.”

Gerry, outdone, says, “Three of spades,” turning back to his performance, and Martin flips the card on the top. His audience goes wild.

They play party games with relish, empty Gerry’s black vinyl schoolbag of all his bizarre knickknacks and circle around the Ouija board in broad daylight. Gerry, searching to the shoulder, says, “Should be somewhere in here.”

From Martin, “Why do you even have this?”

“Pays to be prepared. Ah,” he says, pulling out the planchette. “Here you go.” Melanie, more taken with the oily black switchblade from the depths of Gerry’s bag, swishes it through the air in front of her, making lightsaber sound effects. Tim and Sasha, sitting in front of Gerry, try and fail to identify what in God’s name the patches and pins on his schoolbag are supposed to be.

Bag tour (Ouija board. Switchblade. Half a textbook, split down its middle for no clear reason. Sangobion) over, they attempt to talk to ghosts. Jon isn’t sure if he expects it to work or not. He doesn’t think he cares. The spirit of Jonah Magnus could manifest right in the middle of the library and he’d be indifferent. Martin, however, has to cross himself thrice before he even dares to put his hands onto the pointer. Never mind that the sun’s out, Georgie declares, some ghosts don’t mind the Vitamin D. Martin, next to Jon, whimpers at her words. The planchette jerks. Melanie shouts. Tim, not even pretending to be innocent, howls laughter.

As for Jon. Fingers pressed to the roving planchette, one set of five among six other sets, Jon huddles among his thrilled or terrified friends and feels exactly, gladly, fully sixteen.

Reduced, they adjourn to the Stoker residence. Upon entry they find Danny and Tim’s dad on the couch, watching rugby union reruns, like the posh jocks they are. Martin watches Jon watching, uncharacteristically hoping for violence. Just for one laugh. One would be enough.

Tim stops by the telly. “Hell yes. NZ!”

Danny angles a pillow to hurl at Tim. “You’re a traitor.”

Tim catches the pillow and throws it back with little mercy. “Sorry that I have the common sense to support the best team in the world.”

“Just the four of you?” Tim’s father shifts on the couch.

“Just us,” Tim confirms.

Danny sniffs. “Where’s the goth?”

Exposed for regaling his brother with tales of Gerard Keay, Tim says, “He went home.”

“Nooooooo.” To be fair, given a brother and five minutes, Martin too would be regaling.

Dinner is fast and warm and precedes a lounging on the couch. The rugby’s muted. As Jon daintily cleans his teeth with a toothpick, one hand covering the spectacle, Sasha says, “Your dad looks good for forty-five.”

Tim pelts her with the nearest pillow. “You told me that the last time!”

“It’s true!”

“He’s my dad!” On screen, the All Black six ricochets off the pitch. Jon exhales sharply. “Okay. Changing the subject. Changing the subject. Jon, I heard something pretty interesting recently!”

Jon’s eyes tear away from the telly with some effort. “Yes?”

Tim asks, “Is it true that you dated Georgie Barker?”

Martin, mid-drink, chokes on his chocolate milk. He gives a couple misery-soaked coughs. Too many silent seconds pass.

“You did!?” Sasha demands. “When? For how long?”

Jon slumps back on the couch and sinks down, guilty. It would be adorable if it wasn’t also devastating. “Last...year?” His toothpick sits forgotten between his thumb and pointer. “Who’d you hear this from, anyway?”

Grinning like the devil, Tim flops down right beside Jon. “I have my sources.”

“Tell me who and I might tell you for how long.”

“Aw, rats. Okay. Sascha told me.”

“Sasha?” Jon’s head snaps to Sasha’s direction. “H—”

“No, not Sasha, Sascha,” Tim says quickly. “With a C.”

Jon pauses. “...Casha?”

“Yeah, I dunno, she’s Russian or something. She said she was in Bio Olympiad with the two of you.”

“Don’t know her.”

“Dang. Sure. Well, it’s time for you to give us details.”

Sasha glances discreetly at Martin. Martin looks back, hoping it’s not too obvious that his life has just been ruined by heterosexuality. Sasha’s lips purse. God damn it, it’s obvious, isn’t it. Maybe it was all the times talking to her that he touted Jon as misunderstood and probably secretly really sweet. (All true—but that didn’t make it any less gay, clearly.)

“It was a couple of months,” Jon admits. “Hardly dating. A sandpit affair would’ve been less chaste.”

Martin’s heart, unfortunately, still refuses to be soothed. “She’s my lab partner. And she never told me,” he says, betrayed. Tim reaches over to thunk him on the back a few sympathetic times.

Jon coughs. “I imagine I’m not exactly a trophy ex.”

“Noooooo,” Tim and Sasha refute in unison, echoing Danny before. Martin belatedly realises who Danny must’ve picked it up from. Sasha says, “Not true. You’re a catch.”

“You can be my trophy ex any time you want,” Tim promises.

Jon, primly flustered, says, “Pass. Thanks though,” driving another heterosexual nail into the lid of Martin’s coffin.

“You don’t have to tell us, but why did you break up?” Martin asks. Maybe there was a revelation there. Martin’s hamartia is hope.

“I dropped her cat,” says Jon. “On accident.” No dice.

“Sorry, what?” says Sasha.

“His name’s the Admiral,” Jon says. Quickly, he adds, “He was fine, I mean, he’s a cat. For God’s sake. But Georgie was already cross with me for having a mean week, so it was kind of the last straw.” Jon wears his embarrassment with the oddest dignity.

“A mean week,” Tim parrots flatly.

“A mean week. What don’t you understand.”

“A week where you’re mean?” Tim tries. “To her?”

Jon sinks further down into the couch. “I believe it was in general.”

Sasha clears her throat and gears up her best Jon impression. “No, Andrew, I do not want to join your group for the Wuthering Heights project. I would much rather put myself out on the moors and _die_ of _exposure_.” Another clearing of the throat. The impression gets tetchier. “Why in the name of God did you shelve Plath under P-L-I. If you have trouble comprehending the alphabet I _suggest_ you drop out and go back to _grade school_.” Jon drags both hands down his face, groaning to drown Sasha out.

“That was eerily accurate,” Martin comments mildly.

“Thanks,” says Sasha. “I do my best.”

“I think we’re on okay terms now, though. Hopefully,” Jon says. “We haven’t really discussed it. I would also prefer not to.”

“If you were my ex,” Tim begins, “I’d break up with you for a better reason than that,” he swears. “You can be as mean as you want.”

“Eternally grateful,” Jon says, deeply sarcastic. “What’s the better reason?”

“I met someone else when I was on vacation in Slovakia. It’s not you, it’s me.”

Jon rolls his eyes. At the end of their arc they catch Martin watching, and for a split second they lock gazes. Martin looks away as fast as possible. The picture of the Stoker family on the mantel suddenly becomes very engrossing.

Their conversation lulls. Jon, too, fixes his eyes on something in front of him. He blinks, long and sleepy. “Thank you for...the birthday.” He’s softer, subdued.

“We didn’t do that. I’m pretty sure that was your mother.” Tim, too, is abruptly languid.

“I meant the celebration.”

“Oh, that. It was nothing. Everyone loves a party.”

Jon yawns. “It was nice.”

“Woah, cool the jets, sleepyhead,” Tim says, sitting up. Jon doesn’t follow. “When did you get to bed last night?”

Jon, with what Martin thinks might be a smidgen of pride, says, “Four thirty.”

The reception is unpleasant. Martin says, “ _Jon_ ,” Sasha says, “Christ on a bike.” and Tim comments, “Now there’s a right record, isn’t it? Personal best.”

“Had to clear my Physics homework backlog,” Jon explains. “And then fix the slides for Philosophy, because Marcus can’t cite his bloody sources.”

“Jon, you don’t need a bibliography for a Powerpoint presentation.”

“It’s about my _image!_ ” Jon insists. “Also, Sundays are my GCSE practice days. I need to bring my Bs up if I want to do the IBDP.”

“GCSE prep! In September!” Sasha cries. “I hate you.”

“If you keep burning the midnight oil there won’t be much of you left to do the IBDP, Jon,” Martin chides.

“Yeah. Grind should stop, once in a while.” Tim rummages in Jon’s paper bag of presents and retrieves the sleep mask. “Perfect. Okay, sit tight.”

Eyes already closing, Jon says, “I can’t possibly just nap on your couch...”

Martin accepts the sleep mask from Tim and helps to pull it onto Jon’s head. “Why not?”

“Hnm.” Jon is already boneless. He wriggles fully onto the seat, folds his legs up. The soles of his socks say _Jonathan Sims._ “Maybe.”

“Goodnight, sweet prince.” Sasha pulls out Martin’s present for Jon and slots the cat onto the couch beside Jon’s head. The sight makes Martin’s stomach do somersaults.

“Martin. Martin? Wake me up when you’re leaving.” Jon’s voice is small. “We’re going in the same direction...”

The three of them sit or stand around, surveying their handiwork. Jon’s hair, mussed by the mask, stands up on the top of his head. “I will,” says Martin. Jon is too far gone to reply.

It’s a quarter to ten when he comes to. Martin is in the kitchen, rolling dough for Mr Stoker, nose white with flour. Tim, outside in the living room, stops his song to call, “Mar-tin!”

Martin steps out. He wipes powder from his brow and manages to make a bigger mess of it. Jon, sleep mask still on his head, flattening the licks of dark hair, is packing his schoolbag on the couch. “I should get going—are you in the middle of something? I can wait. Or go first.”

“I was waiting for you, actually,” Martin admits. “Not in the middle of anything. Let me just wash my hands.”

As he pops back into the kitchen, Tim and Sasha resume their duet. The piano rises in the warm, halting tones of someone sight-reading. Tim’s timbre is patient, the words sweet and unknown to Martin. He runs the water and lets the cadences buoy him. From outside, he can hear Jon’s conversational, “The moon’s a unique metaphor for that.”

Tim, perched on the piano bench with his back to Sasha’s side, stops singing to demand, “You speak Mandarin?”

Jon says, “No.”

Outside, the night is sharp with chill. Autumn is the romantic’s season, and now that it’s on its way in, Martin’s daydreams have grown profusely burnt-red and increasingly concerned with holding hands for warmth. He opens his mouth and looses a hot breath. It’s not cold enough yet for it to cloud in the air. He closes his mouth, disappointed, and finds Jon watching him, amused.

Jon turns away and tries for himself, exhaling out an open mouth. Nothing condenses. “Damn,” he says. “Maybe in October.”

Undeterred, Martin tries again, and he and Jon spend the next minute breathing fruitlessly out into the mid-September night. Jon’s schoolbag sags down where it’s hung on the handlebars of his bicycle. The street is long towards the station, and Martin cherishes the fact, laughing around a mouthful of unformed frost. Forget Year 11, and GCSEs, and all the impending schoolwork; if the leaves blush orange in the trees and Martin gets to walk down to the train station with this boy, his life lacks nothing.

Adoration might hurt from time to time, like a fire cupped too close, but with Jon, first and foremost, it’s easy. Martin is content to do it for nothing in return. Like sending signals to deep space, loving the lightyears without holding your breath for aliens.

“So his name’s Magnus?” asks Martin when they’ve breathed themselves to boredom.

“If you prefer him to be Martin Junior, he can be Martin Junior,” Jon says. The plush cat is tucked into the outside pocket of Jon’s schoolbag with its head poking out.

“No, I don’t want the pressure,” Martin says. “He’s Magnus Sims.”

Jon raises an eyebrow. How is that charming in itself? “Magnus Blackwood.”

Martin, before he can catch his runaway tongue, says, “Magnus Sims-Blackwood.”

“Oh, are we co-parenting?” Jon sounds pleased, in his peculiar way.

Martin smiles. “I’ll do weekends.”

“And pay child support.” Jon kicks a leaf in his way, wheeling his bicycle along. “I need to afford his footie lessons somehow.”

“Tim can teach him rugby for free.”

“Tim can be his godfather. Sasha and Georgie will be his godmothers.”

That reminds Martin. “I still can’t believe—“

“Yes, yes, yes.” Jon sniffs. His follow-up is gently self-deprecating. “Believe it or not, I’ve been told I have an ‘eccentric appeal’.”

Oh, Martin believes it, certainly. “It’s just that neither of you said anything.”

“Sorry I don’t brag like a Casanova.”

“Point taken.”

The pre-Autumn breeze sends their hair stirring. Jon, studying Martin, touches a finger to a spot on his own cheek. “You’ve got flour right here.” Martin mimics Jon’s directions on his own face. He checks his hand. It’s clean. “Other side. There, you’ve got it.”

“Thanks,” says Martin, heart swelling. The fabled fire. Filling his chest with warm air.

They proceed in companionable silence, the susurrus of dried detritus moving in the wind and the metallic trickle of the chain on Jon’s bike their only soundtrack. Lights on in the houses of the Stokers’ suburb wink off. Families go to sleep unseen, lives carry on, and Martin couldn’t care any less. He asks, “Did you ever come up with that wish?”

Jon slows, almost to a stop, moving still, but barely. His brow is furrowed in thought. “I don’t really need anything at the moment.”

“There’s got to be something,” Martin says. On Martin’s birthday his wishlist had been longer than the Constitution. “Was Melanie right about the pet unicorn?”

Jon scowls. “If, hypothetically, unicorns walked this planet, it would be beyond inhumane to keep one as a pet.”

Martin can’t help the grin. “Nothing? What about good grades for GCSEs?”

“I don’t need a birthday wish to get that,” Jon reasons, obliviously cocky.

“Oh, of course.”

Jon’s face folds back into the expression that says his brain is hard at work. It dissipates just as fast. Martin wishes he could know just what Jon is thinking whenever his brow furrows like that. Jon says, “There _is_ something I want.”

He moves before Martin can ask what. Jon takes his hand off one handlebar of his bicycle and angles his body, turns as if to brace against a gale. Martin turns, too. For a moment Jon doesn’t do anything, his unknowable myriads condensed on his face. The lines under his eyes. The mystery of his mouth.

Then, eyes lidding, he mumbles, “Stay still,” leans forward, tilts his chin up, and puts that very mystery right onto Martin’s own.

The only thing that stops Martin’s mouth from dropping all the way open is the fact that it’s being kissed. Oh, God and all His angels, there’s no way this is actually happening. Jon’s breath is hot; because Martin is too thunderstruck to think to shut his own eyes, he can see that Jon’s eyes are closed, and that his eyelashes are long enough to touch his cheeks, and that those eyelashes, too, are subtly silvered. His brow is still furrowed, like he’s concentrating, like this is all his effort packed into one kiss.

Martin finally puts his twos and twos together and gets a four: Jonathan Sims is kissing him. Before Martin can lean in in the fashion of all his private imaginations Jon pulls away, leaving Martin to the cold of the breeze. He sways back on his heels, further downwards than Martin expected, and only then does Martin realise Jon had to stand on tiptoe to reach him.

Jon’s eyes are round and black. He’s still plagued with the bedhead from Tim’s couch. Martin is sure that his own eyes are as wide as plates. He opens his mouth to say something like _Oh my God_ , or _Holy shit!_ , but nothing comes out. His mouth stays open. No way in hell Martin Blackwood got this lucky. It would be a Christmas miracle if it was Christmas (it’s not—give it three months). Oh, the blessing of boys who swing both ways.

Jon scans Martin’s astounded face for a second. Then he turns away wordlessly and throws his leg over the back of his bicycle. Martin blinks. “What are you—“ He’s off before Martin can stop him. “Jon!” Martin calls after his rapidly fleeing form, dismayed. “Hey, no!”

It’s hopeless. Jon shrinks down on his bike and picks up speed. He’s a distant speck in a matter of seconds. Eyes fixed on the point down the road where Jon disappeared out of sight, Martin puts his fingers to his lips, right where he’s just been kissed, and physically cannot stop himself from grinning ear to ear, despite the fact that he’s also just been deserted in the middle of the street. He feels like his face might split. He can’t stop.

His giddy excitement overflows. He fist-pumps the air without thinking. His first _yes!_ is silent. Jon Sims maybe might feel the same way. He pinches himself, doesn’t wake up, and does a little dance in celebration. He celebrates bodily, jumps for joy, skips down to the end of the street and then stops when pedestrians start to appear. Would that he had a valley to run through à la The Sound of Music. Suburban London is hardly suitable for lovestruck teenagers.

On the way back home he stands on the Tube and thinks a fierce stream of thoughts. Things like, _In the mornings (for there will be mornings or God help me) I’ll be up early and I will bring you breakfast in bed so you can stay in as long as you want, I know how late you sleep_. And _I’ll take you to pubs so you can watch all the rugby you want, I’ll even learn the rules so I understand what’s going on (maybe I’ll even play it—for you). You’ll fold your coat over the back of the chair and we’ll sit at a table, maybe by the window, even though I prefer the bar, because I think you would prefer the table_.

As he alights, he thinks, _I know you were lonely before this. It takes one to know one._

 _I’ll make sure you’re never lonely again, if only you’ll have me_.


End file.
